


Catharsis

by arcaneGash



Series: But the Stars Bring Balance [3]
Category: Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Super Mario & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, lots of oc/canon interaction, rated for language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-10
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-01-15 20:11:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 50,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12328020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arcaneGash/pseuds/arcaneGash
Summary: Things tend to go awry where black magic is involved.Actual sequel to 998





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> what's up everybody welcome to the third installment of the only thing in life that brings me joy anymore
> 
> this is probably the final part of btsbb, though it's certainly not the end of this universe or the characters because i cannot let go. tentatively working on something that is not shadow siren-centered (i know right) who knows how far it'll take me. 
> 
> anyway this is meant primarily to tie up loose ends from 998. in doing so it also ended up being "beldam's inside story" if you will. so hey if you like redemption arcs and/or prefer canon characters to my stupid ocs this is for you.

The natives of Twilight Town were a superstitious people. It was hard to fault them for it, really. They’d lived in darkness for centuries, shunned by the sunlight and all outsiders save for the bravest, or most foolish, explorers. Some legends said that the place had fallen victim to a curse, condemning the entire area to eternal twilight for a sin that had long been forgotten. The accuracy of these rumors was questionable, but it was an indisputable fact that not so long ago, a similar hex had transformed many innocent villagers into pigs at the tolling of the steeple bell. It was easy to understand why they were so apprehensive about the unknown, and easily spooked.

That said, Cerin found their current mission to be a little silly.

The youngest Shadow Siren in existence did odd jobs to make their living. Mostly they delivered letters and packages from one side of the continent to the other, an arduous and time-consuming task made easy by their ability to travel via shadows to anyplace they could clearly picture in their mind. But they gladly accepted other jobs, too: escorting people through dangerous territory, running errands and other menial tasks for those too busy (or lazy) to do it themselves. They’d become something of a household name among both Twilight Town and the nearby harbor city of Rogueport. If one needed something to be done quickly and quietly, look for the small, witchy-looking shadow person and ask no questions.

But today, at the behest of a neighbor who’d been startled by something “unnatural” on the infamous Twilight Trail, Cerin fought their way through the gnarled undergrowth, on the hunt for anything out of the ordinary. Freddy hadn’t even been able to describe to them what it was that made him so nervous, just that it “really didn’t feel right,” so they had no idea what they’d tell him when this search would inevitably turn up empty. They felt no disturbances even as the sky got bluer, darker, the farther away from the town they traveled. The trees of the pine forest cast long shadows over the peaty ground they crossed, caused by the dim light of the omnipresent moon hanging suspended in the sky. Summer was drawing to a close, the bite of autumn already present in the cool air of the woods. Cerin didn’t mind the chill very much, though the more the sky darkened, the more they wondered if they should have brought something more to wear besides their species-standard gloves and hat. Partially to distract themself from the briskness that threatened to numb their skin, they’d started quietly humming, a couple bars of whatever song popped into their head first.

The spire of the Creepy Steeple towered over the treetops, a dark and angular shape in the near distance. Cerin came to a slow stop as they looked at it, mentally calculating where they were. No one in the entire town should have been this far off the trail to begin with—Freddy really didn’t have any business being this deep in the woods to get scared by something that was probably just his own nerves, anyway. They huffed to themself, planning what they’d say to him as they turned back to go the way they came. They didn’t _do_ anything besides waste his (and their) time, they’d feel unreasonable asking for his money…

A chill swept over them and they stopped dead in their tracks, their eyes widening behind the shaggy black hair that always covered their face. It was like winter had arrived, just for a moment, freezing their skin with its cold caress and then vanishing as soon as it came. _That_ was unusual. And unnerving enough that it would send a skittish Twilighter running for home. Maybe they wouldn’t go back empty-handed after all.

Immediately following the cold snap was a sickening feeling, something that sent their imagination into overdrive, convinced them that something out here was watching them. Freddy was absolutely right: something was _wrong._ They steeled themself, hoping to quell their stomach tying itself in anxious knots. Then they crept into the dim shadow of a nearby pine and pressed their back to its trunk, waiting.

There was movement through the undergrowth to their right. It sounded more solid than a wild Dayzee, but less so than a Cleft, and faster too. Cerin’s breathing hitched, their heart pounding so hard in their chest they were afraid whatever this _thing_ was would hear it. Their hands hung loosely at their sides, but their magic tugged at their fingertips, promising to act on instinct alone if they were startled.

The bushes parted. A dark mass staggered out in front of Cerin, just as shadowy as they were. They barely resisted gasping at the sight—shorter than them by a matter of inches, filthy and matted lavender hair, purple skin, a pointed nose above sharp teeth gritted in pain.

They recognized this thing—this person. This Shadow Siren.

“Beldam,” they said without thinking, causing her to jerk her head upward—she hadn’t seen them until now. Her right arm immediately caught their attention; it was disproportionately large to the rest of her body, and white as bone, standing out unnaturally amongst the gloomy atmosphere. Instead of fingers, her hand had five wicked claws, long and sharp enough to draw lines in the ground as she moved. This whiteness seemed to creep up her arm until her elbow, and the skin beyond that was even darker than normal--it appeared to be _moving,_ as if the flesh itself were splitting apart and coming together like the waves of an ocean. Her other hand, its normal size and shape and clad in the Shadow Siren glove, was pressed firmly against her shoulder, the dark material writhing underneath it. Her eyes glittered in the darkness, pale blue chips of ice in the sunken shadows of her face as she stared Cerin down.

“You,” she growled. The single word was so caustic, so feral, that Cerin felt another chill shoot up their spine. “You’re the one who’s been making so much damnable noise.”

“What _is_ that?” Suddenly it didn’t even matter that this was Beldam, the most volatile and dangerous Shadow Siren they’d ever met. She was hurt, or sick, or something, and clearly needed help.

“Don’t,” she snarled. She was circling them, her gaze locked on their face, but her movement was minimal, slinking, as if she were trying not to be seen. “Leave. You have to leave,” she rasped.

“What happened? Who did this to you?” They stepped forward and she shrank away with what almost sounded like a whimper.

But that weakness only lasted half a second before she spat, “Idiot! Don’t get close.” She ground her teeth, whether in concentration or in pain Cerin couldn’t tell. Then she said, “Look, kid, for once in your life, just listen to me. Get out of here and don’t look back.”

“Why?” Cerin’s need for answers outweighed their common sense.

“It’s dangerous, you imbecile!” The temperature around her dropped, and goosebumps formed down Cerin’s arms. “My—my control is slipping. I want you—I _need_ you—“ she leaned forward, her eyes ablaze. “—to look after my sisters. Make sure this doesn’t—this can’t happen to them, do you understand?” She closed her eyes and drew in a ragged breath. “And for the stars’ sake, whatever you do, don’t tell them this happened. Don’t tell them where I am. Can’t risk it.” Her eyes snapped open again, wild and angry. “Do you understand? Promise me!”

“I promise,” Cerin said automatically, recoiling as Beldam’s arm pulsated again and she groaned in pain. She dropped her normal hand, black residue dripping from her glove but seeming to vanish when it touched the ground. Now Cerin could see that the dark material had consumed her entire shoulder, too, creeping up her neck and across her collarbone. Even ignoring the grotesque _thing_ slithering up her body, she looked to be in horrible shape. It had only been a little over a year since Cerin had last seen her, but she looked like she’d aged twenty. The few places where her skin wasn’t caked in dirt was paler than usual and laced with shallow cuts. She was thin and gaunt, trembling slightly as she stood still.

The two sirens watched each other for another moment before Beldam turned away with a grunt. “Don’t look for me.” The shadows opened up beneath her and she vanished without a trace, leaving Cerin alone on the trail once more.

They reeled for a moment longer, trying to steady their breathing and simultaneously form a plan. Beldam was never one to keep her promises, they reasoned. They felt no obligation to stick to their word either. They, too, fled into the shadows.

Moments later they reappeared in the safety of their home: a small, single-floor house where they’d been taken in just two years ago. It was nothing special, and the most the three sirens who inhabited it could afford, but Cerin didn’t want anything more. It was always warm and calm and quiet here; they couldn’t imagine calling any other place home.

Now, though, the urgency of the situation drowned out their usual instant repose. The moment they emerged out of the darkness beneath, they shouted, “Vivian!”

There was no reply, their voice traveling alone through the empty halls. Mostly empty, that was. Now that they’d had a second to process where they were, they saw that they had appeared right in front of the front doorway, and a large siren was seated at the kitchen table. She was squinting down at a pile of papers before her, a pen in her hand and its cap in her mouth. Her other hand was pressed up against her forehead, her blonde bangs sticking out between her fingers, revealing a pair of golden eyes that flicked back and forth across the page.

Cerin approached, close enough to poke her, when she realized they were there. The gnawed cap fell out of her mouth and she gave them a small smile that quickly died when she met their eyes. They realized a moment too late that they probably looked…distraught.

As quickly as they could manage, they fingerspelled out Beldam’s name. They didn’t even fully sign the “d” before the pen in Marilyn’s hand snapped in half.

"Where?" she signed, all the warmth leaving her eyes.

"The trail," they replied, wincing as she tensed. "It’s bad," they managed before slowing, unsure how to describe what happened. It was hard enough to apply verbal words to what they’d seen, and they were still in the process of learning sign language… "She’s hurt," they decided finally. "Where’s Vivian?"

Marilyn shook her head, pushing the chair back to stand up. She was twice their height and four times their weight, an even distribution of fat and muscle. Her immense physical strength by Shadow Siren standards served her well, and her magical abilities were just as powerful. There was no one Cerin would rather have on their side. She shook her hair back into her eyes, signed, "Follow me," and sank into the shadows.

Cerin obeyed, warping to the outskirts of town, where the trail into the thick woods began. Marilyn was already making her way through the trees, her every movement as purposeful and unyielding as a battleship. Cerin knew her well enough to know that this stoicism masked anxiety, which didn’t settle their own at all.

The pair traveled deep into the forest, off the well-worn trail, away from the steeple at the path’s end. Cerin knew there was nothing out here but untamed woodland, but Marilyn didn’t once seem lost or even slightly uncertain of where she was going. They followed her silently, unwilling to interrupt her or slow them both down by asking questions. The sky darkened around them, and the pines grew so thickly they began to blot out the moon overhead.

Finally Marilyn halted in front of a structure Cerin had never seen before. It looked like it had once been a shack, but it had fallen into such disrepair it was a surprise it was still standing. One of the side walls had been taken out completely, and the roof over it had caved in, giving the whole thing a lopsided appearance.

Marilyn entered, eschewing what little remained of the doorway and instead picking her way through the rubble that surrounded the fallen wall. Cerin followed, inspecting the crumbling brick and decaying wooden beams that strained to hold up the remnants of the roof. Under the shelter of the remaining overhang was an odd collection of various belongings: a discarded pile of various tattered fabrics, a splintered stool that seemed to serve as a table, a broken half of an actual table that lay upside down with its legs in the air. On one of the legs hung a hat, exactly like Cerin’s except with blue stripes instead of black.

There could only be one reason Marilyn was so familiar with this decrepit hovel, so far off the Twilight Trail that even Cerin didn’t know about it. She’d never mentioned it to them or anything…now she stood in the center of the broken house, looking around as if expecting its occupant to show herself. She caught Cerin’s eye and a muscle in her face twitched at their expression.

"You knew about this place," they signed, deciding to let her choose if it was a question or not.

She nodded, lifting her hands to sign one thing: "Wait."

They got the message, grudgingly dropping the subject for now. It was just as well, as the chill from before swept through the ravaged house, and both sirens turned toward the missing wall.

Beldam hadn’t changed much since Cerin had seen her twenty minutes ago, which was probably a good thing. The moonlight outlined her in silver but cast her entire body in darkness, save the stark and eerie whiteness of her abnormal hand. Slowly she turned her head from Marilyn to Cerin, her unaffected hand clenching into a fist.

“This is the _exact opposite_ of what I told you to do,” she hissed.

She approached but only got a few steps before stumbling and catching herself. Marilyn protectively stepped in front of Cerin, one hand held behind her while the other was raised to her chest level, crackling with electricity. Cerin couldn’t see around her, but they didn’t have to when Beldam raised her voice.

“Is this a game to you, you insufferable idiot? Do you find this _funny?_ All I wanted was for you to leave me to die in peace!”

Marilyn took a single step forward and Beldam scurried away, pressing herself against one of the still-standing walls, as far away from her as possible. Cerin crept out from behind Marilyn, joining her side as the two sirens stared down the third. Beldam cowered, clutching her wounded arm. It was…pitiful.

"What happened?" Marilyn asked.

The pain in Beldam’s face intensified. She peeled her gloved hand away from her shoulder and looked at its palm. Then, with a visible effort, she drew up her other arm, slowly moving the clawed fingers as if she couldn’t believe it was attached to her. She dropped both hands, meeting Marilyn’s eyes unflinchingly. When she next spoke, her words were slow and her voice was quiet.

“I did this to myself. The magic I channeled had some…unintended effects.”

Concern was etched in every line of Marilyn’s face. She stepped forward again and Beldam further shrank away. “No! It might be contagious!”

Marilyn froze, and almost self-consciously crossed her arms. Beldam relaxed minutely, returning her normal hand to its place on her arm. “The necromancy, the black magic, it’s been eating away at me,” she muttered, lifting her face so Marilyn could better read her lips. “I thought I had control of it, and I _did_ for some time _,_ but it turned on me so quickly…” Her eyes traveled from her sister’s face to Cerin’s and then dropped to the ground. “It’s what I deserve, I suppose.”

Something about the situation was painfully familiar to Cerin. They wracked their brain, trying to remember where they’d heard this before, as Marilyn signed another question that they didn’t catch.

“Of course I haven’t!” Beldam snapped. “I’m not stupid, I haven’t touched it since…you know. But that doesn’t seem to matter. It took over my hand and just…kept going.” She held up said hand, curling her lip in disgust. “I didn’t want you to know, Marilyn. I figured you and Vivian would both be better off ignorant.” Now she shot an icy glare in Cerin’s direction. “But I never get what I want, do I?”

“We can help,” Cerin said, ignoring Beldam’s deepening scowl. “There has to be a way to fix this somehow.”

“I never asked for your help.” Beldam pushed herself off the wall to stand unsupported. The clawed fingers of her corrupted hand scraped against the stone floor. “If you wanted to help me so badly, you could have started by listening to me when I told you to leave me alone. But instead you went out of your way to do everything I asked you not to. You don’t understand—no, you refuse to understand!”

Cerin said nothing, confident that speaking more would only further incense her. Beldam swept on, “Oh, now you choose to keep your mouth shut? Listen, you brat, _you_ brought my family into this when they didn’t ever need to know! And now they’re going to know every single grisly detail! You could have spared them this knowledge, this pain, like I tried to!”

She lurched forward, a cold blast of air following her movement and hitting Cerin directly. Reacting on instinct, Cerin closed the distance, advancing on Beldam with their shoulders squared and their magic again weighing heavily in their fingers. She wouldn’t actually attack them in the state she was in, not if she had any sense left in her, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t a threat.

They’d expected her to retreat again, fall back against the wall. She did neither. Her entire face was twisted in pain, but her eyes smoldered. The temperature dropped around them both, and Cerin watched her breath take shape in the air as she spat, “What else must you take from me?!”

Her corrupted arm reared back and swung. She missed by a mile, the claws slicing through empty air several inches from Cerin’s chest. Yet their skin tore as if the blow had connected. They jerked backward with a cry, pressing their hand against the new wound.

Beldam hit the floor with a muffled thump. Marilyn loomed over her, her hands raised, sparks jumping in between her fingers. Through the gloom of dusk, it looked like Beldam’s arm was convulsing. It was only when Marilyn jumped back with a noise of revulsion that Cerin realized it wasn’t a trick of the light.

Beldam groaned in pain again, her normal arm supporting her weight as her other seized involuntarily. Ice from her gloved fingertips was crawling across the stone in a pattern like a spider web. The rest of her was too dark to see, until the writhing stopped. Panting and trembling, she rose to her full height. A black band like a tiger stripe stretched across her collarbone, another inching further up her neck until it cradled her jawline. The whiteness, too, had climbed up her elbow, its thin and vein-like tendrils within centimeters of touching her shoulder. Her hair hid her eyes, though Cerin felt their skin prickle as if she were staring right at them.  

No one dared move, let alone speak. Beldam swayed slightly as she turned her head to look from Cerin to Marilyn. A pained smile contorted her lips until it looked more like she was baring her teeth. “Told you so,” she whispered, the words a faint hiss that could have easily gotten lost in the wind. Then with a final grunt of pain, the shadows beneath her swallowed her whole, leaving not a trace.

It took Cerin a few more moments to realize their wound had stopped hurting, and they glanced down at their chest, surprised the stinging had gone away so quickly. The cut was only as long as their little finger and not even deep enough to bleed. They’d gotten worse scrapes from the jungle brambles on Keelhaul Key.

They looked back up in time for Marilyn to sign to them, "She’ll be back. We need to leave."

Before they could ask her why, she had vanished too. They took a moment or two to compose themself, breathing in the cool air of the forest, running their fingers along the cut that barely was, before following.

They had barely phased through the floor of the main room when Marilyn was there, very much in their personal space, examining their injury in the light of indoors. Whatever she saw didn’t seem to satisfy her, as she sat back with a huff and scratched her head.

"It doesn’t hurt," they told her. "I’m just as confused as you are."

She shrugged. "Keep an eye on it."

"What are we going to do about her?" they asked, wondering if she had more of a plan than they did.

She shrugged again. "I’m working on it. Don’t go back there in search of her. She hates you and seeing you just pisses her off. But she’ll be more willing to cooperate with me."

That made sense. Cerin had one more question, though. "What do we tell Vivian?"

Marilyn’s face fell and she bit her lip, her hands raised as if she were thinking very carefully about what to say. "Does she need to know?" she said at last.

The third and youngest Shadow Siren sister had a less than stellar relationship with the eldest. As far as Cerin was concerned, Vivian had every right to detest Beldam with every cell in her body, though they knew she didn’t, and were unsure if she wanted to. News like this would stress her out, reopen old wounds…but something didn’t sit right with Cerin about purposefully sheltering her from it. "I think she deserves to," they signed.

"I agree, but…" Marilyn’s reluctance would have been obvious even without her words.

"I know. I’m just saying, I don’t think I can keep this from her." Cerin gave a shrug of their own.

"We can worry about that when the time comes," said Marilyn. "In the meantime, this has to be our secret. I’ll keep Beldam in check as best I can, while you look for answers." A puzzled look came over her, and she asked, "Why were you even out there, anyway?"

She looked amused when Cerin clapped a hand against their forehead. All the excitement had made them forget—Freddy was still out there, expecting an explanation. They needed to warn him away from the woods as soon as possible. "Business," they replied, fumbling a little with the signs in their rush. "I have to go."

Marilyn waved them off, offering them a tired smile that they mimicked before traveling through the shadows once more.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kind of a shorter chapter cause the next one is a monster (and also probably more interesting.) we're gravitating away from my ocs i promise it just takes time to get there

“Is that really what happened?” Freddy’s yellow eyes widened as he spoke, piercing and sharp against the shadows that fell over the top half of his face. The native Twilighters all bore similarities to tattered and worn dolls, and Freddy was no exception. From his green skin, to the countless seams and patches on his earth-toned clothes, to the way he moved as if he were a puppet being pulled by invisible strings, he was the archetypal Twilighter, a perfect match to the gloomy atmosphere of Twilight Town.

Cerin nodded, resisting the urge to pluck at their gloves. “It seems kind of hard to believe, I know.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“To go back there, you mean?” Cerin made a show of thinking hard about the question. Just as they expected, Freddy’s face fell at their hesitance. “I don’t think so,” they said. “Not any more than it usually is to go out on the trail. If you _must_ go, I’d just advise that you be really, really quiet. They won’t hurt you if they find you, but I’m sure you’d rather just avoid a confrontation altogether.”

“Oh, definitely,” Freddy said, nodding vigorously. “I’ll be sure to tell everyone else, too—you’re really brave, you know that?”

“It was nothing,” Cerin said automatically, their lips quirking into a bashful smile. Compliments always made them feel a little awkward. Knowing that they didn’t deserve this praise didn’t make it any easier to swallow.

“And so modest, too,” Freddy said with a sincere grin. He was reaching into one of the pockets of his jacket. Cerin saw it coming and was shaking their head by the time he retrieved it.

“I can’t take your money,” they said as firmly as they could manage. “I barely even did anything.”

“But you did,” said Freddy, cocking his head to the side. “You took the time out of your day to investigate this, and you even fixed the problem! I couldn’t imagine doing what you did. Walking into the steeple, by myself, to tell the Boos to knock off their pranks?” He gave a shudder that Cerin was pretty sure was exaggerated, then grabbed their hand before they could pull away and dropped the coins into it. “You deserve this, trust me. I can’t thank you enough…I know who I’m going to the next time I have a problem.” He beamed at them and walked away before they could find the words to protest.

They glanced down at the coins in their palm—twenty, not bad—and closed their fingers around them, squeezing their eyes shut at the surge of guilt.

It disturbed them how easy lying came to them. It was a Shadow Siren thing, probably.

Telling Freddy the truth about what they found in the woods was out of the question. Instead they fed him a story about the Boos that haunted the nearby steeple, claiming a couple of the sneaky ghosts had ventured outside to scare anyone and everyone they came across. The Boos’ hypothetical presence would explain the cold chill and the sensation of wrongness that Freddy experienced. In truth, Cerin had never seen a Boo outside the steeple’s perimeter, but what Freddy didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

Then again, if Beldam continued to roam the woods unchained in such a not-entirely-sane state, it was only a matter of time until it _would_ hurt him, or any other Twilighter unlucky enough to be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

They shook their head, crushing their mounting frustration before it threatened to boil over. They’d done what they could—Freddy had heeded their warning, and he’d tell all his friends and family too. As long as they were smart about it, the Twilighters would be safe, they told themself. Ignoring the flare of guilt, they pocketed the handful of coins. They’d make it up to Freddy somehow, when they didn’t have more pressing matters on their mind. For now, though, they watched his retreating form disappear amongst the brown duskiness of the town, and sank into the beckoning shadows.

The dismal woodland of the Twilight Trail opened into a clearing at its end. This clearing contained the only building that wasn’t part of the town: an ancient church built of black brick and stone, one single twisted spire looming over the ocean of pines. It was fenced off from the rest of the wilderness, though by now its front yard was beginning to look just as untamed and overgrown as the surrounding forest.

This was the Creepy Steeple, the reviled haunt of countless devious poltergeists and monsters. Cerin had many memories of this place, some good, most bad. They pushed the shiver of discomfort to the back of their mind as they approached the iron gate, left mostly closed but unlocked. It opened with a whiny creak, just enough for them to slip through.

They crossed the courtyard and opened the wooden doors, ignoring their groaned protest, and glanced around the foyer in which they now stood. Nothing had changed since the last time they were here, only a few weeks ago. The room was dim, lacking a light source except for the moonlight, coming in through the stained-glass mural taking up much of the northernmost wall. Two balconies lined the walls high above their head.

They followed the dusty, discolored blue carpet halfway through the room, where they approached another wooden door built into the north wall. Something faded into view at exactly their eye level just as they reached for the handle—semi-transparent, white as snow, with a large mouth full of long teeth. They retracted their hand, unsurprised but less than comfortable with groping through the creature’s body.

“Hi,” they said, giving the Boo a once-over. “I’m just here to check on something really quick.”

The Boo opened and closed their mouth a few times, their beady black eyes flicking from Cerin's face to everywhere else. “I’m, uh…I can’t let you do that,” they decided, recovering themself and giving Cerin a wicked grin. “You’ve got some nerve, you know, waltzing in here like you own the place—“

“Hey, hold up,” another Boo called, swooping down from somewhere above and hovering between the first and Cerin, holding out one stubby limb in a “halt” motion. “You don’t wanna mess with this one, trust me. Let them do their thing.”

The first Boo visibly deflated, but the two ghosts vanished, phasing through the walls and leaving Cerin seemingly alone in the building again. They knew they weren’t, though—some couple hundred Boos haunted these halls. At least a few were watching every move Cerin made, whether invisible or hidden among the rafters. The ghosts didn’t take kindly to trespassers, but Cerin was probably the singular exception. What they had done to gain immunity to the Boos’ usual tricks, they didn’t exactly know. Maybe it was because the Boos had seen them at their very worst on multiple occasions…being born here, alone, confused, and terrified, hadn’t made them the most stable or understanding roommate from the Boos’ perspective.

But as long as they continued to leave the siren alone, Cerin wouldn’t dare complain. The door they now stepped through led outside, onto a sort of porch running parallel to the steeple’s walls. At the back of the building was another door and a crimson switch. Cerin gave the switch the most cursory of glances, and something slithered out of the shadow they cast on the stone beneath them—a hand-like appendage, solid black and roughly their height, its fingers clenching into a fist. It reared up, like a cobra preparing to strike, and slammed on the switch from above, vanishing the moment it made contact. A rumbling noise made the ground beneath them quake, but the tremors were short-lived, and in a matter of seconds the area was just as eerily quiet as it had been.

Cerin couldn’t help but be proud of themself. They’d been practicing with their powers at every opportunity, and had mastered them enough to control the shadow hands they conjured with only their mind. To some extent, anyway—if they needed to summon a bigger or more powerful shadow than the one they had just used, they’d still have to use their actual hands to control it, making it mimic their motion. But they knew that eventually, they would be able to control their powers using their mind alone—how cool would that be?

Their enthusiasm faltered a little bit as they reentered the building, into the steeple’s most posterior room, inaccessible except from outside. There was nothing here but three doors built high into the wall and a staircase that currently led straight up to the northernmost door. The switch outside, while appearing to have done nothing, controlled the movement of the staircase from one door to another. The middle door dumped whoever opened it out into the foyer again, but the other two led to the balconies above it, and the north one to the spire and the belfry.

Other than that, the room was empty and comparatively uninteresting, but Cerin’s guts twisted anyway. It was here, in this isolated and bare room, they had been born, forming out of the darkness in one of the corners. They were reasonably sure, anyway—they didn’t have any specific memories, but these walls had always carried some intrinsic familiarity that even the rest of the steeple didn’t. And it invoked feelings, snippets of the unrelenting panic and all-consuming fear that had been much of their infancy.

They ascended the staircase and left the room behind as fast as possible.

Now they were yet another shadow atop the balcony, looking down among the Boos that had since appeared in the foyer. They ducked under the stained-glass that poured moonlight into the steeple, flitting to the spire before they could be further questioned.

They’d come all this way, winding the spire’s stairs with their fingers crossed, to the belfry in search of one thing only. They held their breath as they entered through the hole in the floor, scanning the area. Someone had once inhabited the bell tower, but he’d since abandoned this place and all his belongings, and now they sat, collecting dust. Cerin wondered if he’d ever return to this quiet, isolated life after having had a taste of the limelight and found themself doubting so. This wasn’t what they were here for, though. They bypassed the bathtub, the easy chair, the TV, to the center of the room, glancing around with a confused frown. The last time they’d been here, in search of it, it had been sitting out in the open to bait them. Where was it normally…?

They craned their neck upward, peering into the waist of the enormous bell above, and was rewarded with a flash of glittering red. They could have sighed with relief, feeling the metaphorical burden lift off their shoulders. So the worst hadn’t happened: Beldam had been unsupervised for over a year, practically next door to a largely unprotected Crystal Star, but she’d left it alone. They held out their hands and the artifact floated gently down into their grasp. It was a solid gemstone, five-pointed and multifaceted, shining as it caught the moonlight and glowing like flame in their hands. The Ruby Star—Cerin’s personal favorite of the seven Stars.

“Now what?” they muttered aloud. They’d been so afraid Beldam had been after the Crystal Stars again, they’d never even considered what they’d do next if that wasn’t the case. They glanced over the Star, checking it for chips or fractures that they knew weren’t there, watching their hundreds of reflections mirror their movement.

The current theory was that Shadow Sirens were more connected to the Crystal Stars than any other species, having been made by the same being. Cerin had been hoping that the Ruby Star would hold some kind of answer regarding Beldam’s condition. But it was an artifact, not an oracle. They puzzled over it for a moment more, plotting out their next course of action.

Then their chest seared and they jumped away with a cry, dropping the Star.

It was unhurt, stopping its fall an inch above the floor, but Cerin was not as lucky. They let a swear escape them as their wound burned underneath their fingers. The pain only lasted a moment longer, but they remained still even after it faded away, afraid that even breathing too deeply would irritate it again. They pulled their hands away and saw light smears of red on their gloved fingertips.

The wound had grown. Not hugely, but enough to be noticeable. It was now the length and width of their index finger, and deep enough to bleed a little. It was still nowhere near a bad injury, a minor laceration at worst, but they weren't sure what they'd done to aggravate it again. They ran their fingers along the scratch, expecting it to sting, but nothing happened.

They lifted their eyes from their chest to the Star before them. Now untethered by the siren who summoned it, it hovered at their eye level, and ascended unhurriedly back inside the bell above. Cerin quirked an eyebrow, watching the darkness swallow the glimmering scarlet. It was probably as safe there as any other place…at least it wasn’t out in the open.

They unconsciously touched their cut again as they peered out of the open-air windows of the bell tower, measuring the distance from the tips of the pine trees to the moon in the sky. It was rising—a relative term, the moon never truly rose nor set here, but it was lower in the sky during the “day” and higher at “night.” Cerin winced. They’d meant to do one more important thing today, but it would have to wait. They had a schedule to keep, for the sake of their clients. Giving one last look to the Star nestled away in the bell, they sank into the shadows themself.

The house was dark and empty. Marilyn being out didn’t surprise them, given her new task of pacifying her rogue elder sister, but her younger was nowhere to be seen. Cerin pondered this as they flicked on the light and rifled through the refrigerator, remembering with an annoyed huff at their forgetfulness. Vivian would be out for a few days, on some apparently exclusive retreat with her friend Goombella. Some kind of archeological conference slash vacation, the latter of which was the reason Vivian was even invited. Hopefully she was having a better time than they were…maybe by the time she returned, Cerin and Marilyn would have picked up at least some of the pieces.

Their appetite was less than they expected, but they choked down a cold portion of leftover shroom steak anyway. They attempted to clean their cut, not finding much success given that even the deepest parts had long stopped bleeding, and resolved to inform Marilyn about it when she returned. Until then, they went to bed earlier than usual, and laid awake for hours.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i doubt this is actually a problem but it's probably fair to warn that tank (grown-up yoshi kid) is in this so there's gonna be some language. also like mentions of blood and stuff but if you've read this far (or any of my work) that's to be expected
> 
> oh for the record i arbitrarily named whatever species bowser and the koopalings are "royal koopas" and i'm sticking by that until canon corrects me or offers something more specific. i'm treating the term "koopa" as not a species but a genus cause even according to mario wiki it's a pretty expansive taxonomic group. also i'm a biologist and phylogenies in particular are my thing i can't not pull something like this

They awoke to frenzied banging on their front door and half rolled, half tumbled out of bed, hitting the floor with a thump that rattled their brain. They laid there a moment, gradually processing what was happening, when more pounding made their annoyance flare and woke them up further.

They slinked to the door, catching a glance of the clock on the stove as they passed—eight in the morning. Whoever was demanding their attention better have a damn good reason. They grabbed the handle and yanked the door open just as their visitor had reared back to give it another rapping. The Yoshi stopped just in time, his clenched fist freezing in the air an inch or two above the siren’s head.

“Hey, dude. Man, you look terrible.”

Cerin fixed him with a glare that he must have felt, as he dropped his hand and offered them the same cheesy smile he wore for pictures.

“You woke me up to insult me, then,” they said flatly. “I’m going back to bed.”

“Aw, come on, I didn’t mean it like that,” Tank protested, holding his hands up. He made little effort to distinguish his civilian self from his wrestler persona known to most as the Great Gonzales Jr. There wasn’t any point to it—Yoshis were rare in this part of the world, and given his uncommon and eye-catching orange skin and blue hair and spines, hiding who he really was wasn’t worth the trouble. People eventually just accepted that the champion of the Glitz Pit made regular pilgrimages outside of Glitzville. He wore his standard outfit—blue boots and a green and white-spotted bandanna around his neck, on which hung a pair of triangular sunglasses. Such a pair of shades was necessary in a sunny city in the sky like Glitzville, but here in the dimness of Twilight Town they’d only blind him.

“I came here ‘cause I need a favor, actually,” he admitted, one of his hands finding its way behind his head.

“I hope you’re kidding.”

“Nope!” He offered them another bright grin. “Come on, man, you’re not gonna do your best friend a solid even though he’s asking all nice?”

Cerin brought a gloved hand to their forehead and heaved a sigh. “Come back in four hours and we’ll talk.”

“Yeah, this can’t wait,” Tank said, dropping his eyes to the ground. “I told Jolene it’d be done a week ago, and if she finds out it hasn’t, she’s gonna…I dunno, chew me out and dock my pay, probably.”

Cerin held his gaze for several moments. Tank shifted his weight, tugging at his bandanna.

“I know how stupid I sound, okay?” he mumbled, his beaming smile fading to a frown. “I’ll make it up to you if you help me do this, I promise.”

Cerin sighed again, mostly for appearance. Tank had helped them out of some tough spots before, and had always been there when they needed him. They didn’t think they could have said no even if they wanted to. They just felt obligated to put on a show of displeasure, make sure he knew he wasn’t off the hook. Their friendship involved a lot of posturing. “Give me a couple minutes to get ready.”

Like a switch had been flipped, Tank’s quieter sincerity evaporated and his boisterous stage presence overtook him once again. “You’re saving my ass, dude, I really owe you one.”

Cerin mumbled something affirmative and shut the door, crossing the house to their room and fumbling for their hat, forgoing their other belongings. This would just be a quick errand, hopefully, they didn’t see the need to bring any money or their prized Mailbox SP. They met Tank back outside and followed him as the two made their way to Twilight Town’s warp pipe.

No words passed between them as they traveled. Cerin reasoned Tank was in a hurry to make it back to Glitzville as soon as possible. They weren’t complaining about the silence, given their lingering exhaustion and resulting grumpiness. They only vaguely felt the cool, stale air of Rogueport Sewers, the uncomfortable warmth of morning sunlight in Rogueport proper, and the clean but businesslike interior of the blimp on one of its many regular journeys to the floating city.

It was only here, while they waited and watched the land and the ocean disappear as they ascended, that Tank broke the silence. “Ouch. Where’d you get that cut?”

Cerin snapped to attention, remembering too late that they meant to cover up their wound before they left. They glanced down at their chest as if first realizing it was there, thankful that it didn’t seem to have gotten any worse since last night. What was something they encountered regularly that could reasonably slice them open like this…?

“Cleft on the trail,” they said with a shrug.

“Oh.” Tank accepted this, but a second later he narrowed his eyes. “Wait, really? Those things are slow as hell. And you can hide yourself completely in, like, half a second—“

“Caught me off guard,” Cerin lied. Internally they cursed themself. It would have been so much more believable if they’d made up something about Keelhaul… “It’s been a rough couple of days.”

The look of sympathy that crossed Tank’s face hurt more than the injury. Cerin turned to the window and didn’t look away until the blimp had touched down in Glitzville.

“Be as stealth as possible,” Tank hissed to them as the two exited. He was unfolding his sunglasses from his bandanna and putting them on. Cerin felt a pang of jealousy as they mashed their fists into their own eyes, wiping away the tears that threatened to form. Sirens had excellent night vision, but that came at the cost of adjusting very slowly and painfully to brightly-lit places, and nowhere was brighter than the city above the clouds. They kept their head ducked low more because of that than Tank’s instruction.

The Glitz Pit, as Glitzville’s biggest attraction, was only a minute’s travel away from the blimp, and Cerin nearly sighed in relief at being indoors. Tank was already off, to the back of the lavish lobby, approaching one of the burly security guards posted to keep visitors out of the back areas. The guard stepped aside, quirking an eyebrow at Tank’s lagging shadow but keeping his mouth shut.

Cerin ran occasional errands for the arena’s manager, Jolene, and was quite familiar with the behind-the-scenes. The hallways were dimly lit with flickering fluorescent lights, the walls and floor a dingy gray. The scent of stale sweat made Cerin wrinkle their nose—second to the crowds that often gathered in the lobby, that was the worst part. Doorways lined the walls, each with their own identical security guard standing by, unmoving even as Tank and Cerin brushed past them.

“What are you even making me do?” Cerin asked. Tank shushed them the moment they began speaking.

“Zip it. You never know who’s listening.”

He swung his head around and lowered his shades to deliver an accusatory glare at the nearest guard, who gave the slightest shrug of his shoulders and pulled his fingers across his lips.

There was one door along these walls that did not have an accompanying guard. Tank slipped inside, and Cerin followed, shutting it behind them with a click. They scanned the room, noting its emptiness save for a big metal staircase leading to a floor above, as Tank sighed, taking off his sunglasses and spreading his arms out.

“That’s better. Keep it down, though, there’s a vent upstairs and it carries sound through the whole Pit.”

“This is the storage room,” Cerin said, meeting Tank’s eyes and crossing their arms.

“Sure is,” Tank said, giving them yet another phony smile that tabloids would have eaten up.

“Tank. You’re seriously going to make me do your chores?”

“It’s not _chores,”_ Tank said with an air of indignance. Then it faded as he began to slip into his sincere mode again. He gave a nervous chuckle. “I make the Pit way too much money for them to saddle me with this kind of bull. No, this is, uh…a punishment.”

“What?” Cerin’s irritation faltered somewhat with this new information, which was just as well, as their cut was starting to twinge. They brought their hand up to their chest as they asked, “What did you _do?”_

Tank scowled. “I’ll tell you what I did. The Glitz Pit took on a new fighter recently, you probably heard of her. Her stage name’s Cinder, she’s that one royal Koopa tearing her way through the ranks.”

Cerin nodded. They really only kept up with the events of the wrestling world for Tank’s sake, but they did recall seeing a minute or two of a fight with someone that matched this description on TV. Royal Koopas were even rarer than Yoshis here—they’d been surprised to see one in the flesh, more or less.

“You didn’t tangle with her, did you?” they asked. They may have only seen a little of her combat skills, but she had been merciless and hard-hitting. They didn’t think they wanted to get on her bad side.

“Do I look stupid?” Tank asked, rolling his eyes. “Nah, man, I’m pretty sure she could kick my ass. I’m actually kinda worried about what’ll happen when she reaches the top. I think she has an honest shot at the championship—I dunno what I’m gonna do if I lose it. Like, I’m not gonna be _mad_ if I do, she deserves it, but--” He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “No, no, no, that’s not what happened. What happened was that professional fighters are _jackasses.”_

Cerin pulled a face and Tank nodded grimly. “Oh yeah. This happened before she really started making a name for herself, back when she had only beaten a couple of the minor-league scrubs. She was minding her own business in the lobby when some clown from the major leagues—one of the Magikoopa Masters—comes out of nowhere and starts jeering her, for bein’ a girl, mostly. She’s not the first female fighter the Pit’s ever had, but she is the first one to compete by herself, and I guess solo fighters are generally more of a target anyway. I was there, I saw the whole thing—she ignored him but he just didn’t stop, callin’ her all sorts of awful things—there were kids in the lobby, they heard everything!” Tank had started pacing, gesticulating wildly as he spoke. “Some people looked uncomfortable but others were laughing and encouraging him. I thought for sure one of the guards would come and break it up, but I dunno, nobody was doing anything but standing by and letting it happen.”

He stopped in his tracks and laughed, though he still wore a glower. “If I knew how good of a fighter she was then, I mighta stopped and let her take him on herself, but I didn’t, and I was sick of listening to this jerkoff pretend like he was better than her. So I ran in. Yelled something I won’t repeat. Clocked him clear across the lobby.”

Cerin sucked a breath in through their teeth and Tank nodded. “It felt so damn good, I don’t regret it for a second. But I didn’t get out of it unscathed.”

Cerin tilted their head. “Jolene, of all people, punished you for that?”

“She had to,” Tank explained, pressing his fist into his other hand and cracking his knuckles. “She was just as pissed as I was that it even happened, of course, but my contract said that I was in the wrong. I threw the first punch, I made it physical. Fighting outside the ring is ‘grounds for an immediate termination,’ apparently, and if I didn’t get hit with any consequences, the Magikoopa could complain—he could even sue. So Jolene gave me the lightest sentence she could, and here I am. The Great Gonzales Jr, the champion of the Glitz Pit, doing bitch work like I’m some pissy minor-leaguer.”

Cerin had been sympathetic up until that last part. Knowing the full story didn’t change that they’d come all the way out here to do Tank’s menial labor, and weren’t even getting paid. “You mean you’re dragging in a friend to do it instead,” they said, narrowing their eyes.

“Hey, you already agreed to do it,” Tank said with a smirk. He shrank away a little when Cerin leveled a scowl of their own at him. They almost regretted it when their cut twinged again, but that reminded them that it existed, and how it had happened, and so many other things they could be— _needed_ to be—doing right now.

They felt like heat was rolling off them in waves. Their fists clenched of their own volition, so hard their nails bit into their palms even through their gloves. Their vision darkened as they stared at Tank head-on, which they blamed on the mediocre lighting in this stupid storage room of this _stupid_ arena where they were going to waste precious time with _stupid_ things—

And then they were yelling. “Do you have _any_ idea what else I need to be doing right now?!  What makes you think you can just dump this on me like it’s nothing? You won’t even take the fall for something you did yourself, instead you have to drag me down with you! What is your problem?!”

So swept up in their anger, they only came back to themself when their cut seared and they snarled. It panged five times, each more painful than the last, and when it was over they were out of breath and shaking. They squeezed their eyes shut and opened them again, wondering if they were imagining the expansion of the injury another inch…

They remembered Tank and glanced back up at him. In any other circumstance, they would have laughed at the way his jaw hung open, and his widened eyes, but now his expression was just another punch to the gut. He was bracing himself, his fists raised to his chest level, his stance wide.

Cerin looked down again just in time to spot a dark purple mist covering the ground around them, only remaining for a split second before it dissipated in the air. Now they were sure their jaw dropped too. That mist, they had learned, was of their own creation. It often preceded the use of their powers, and though they’d been working to suppress it, it was most likely to appear if they were feeling especially angry or tense.

Tank had every reason to think they were about to attack him.

“I’m sorry,” they blurted out. Tank relaxed somewhat as the mist vanished, but they found that a small comfort in the wake of what had just happened. They yanked at the wrist of their glove, their teeth scraping their bottom lip as they tried to find words. “I’m—I—I don’t know what came over me, I’ve never done that before…”

Tank’s eyes flicked up and down as he sized them up, but he seemed to think the threat had passed, as he approached with his hands open. “Damn, dude, I’ve never seen you that pissed before. Saw my life flash before my eyes for a second.”

It was probably a joke, but Cerin winced as if he’d stabbed them instead. They reached up to pull the brim of their hat lower over their eyes.

“You’re right,” he said, his voice low and quiet. “I shouldn’t have pestered you into doing this for me, it’s something I shoulda done myself days ago. I didn’t know you were under this much stress.”

Against their better judgement, Cerin glanced up and ground their teeth inside their mouth at Tank’s eyes, full of concern…full of pity.

“No,” they said, feeling whatever lingering remnants of their anger fizzle away. “I’m…I’m here anyway, and I won’t be able to warp back home until I calm down a little. I might as well help.”

“You’re sure?”

“Don’t worry about it,” they said. _Don’t worry about me._

“If you insist,” Tank said, straightening himself up a little and rolling his shoulders. “You know I was kidding about making you do all the work yourself, I’m not _that_ much of a jerk. I just wanted you ‘cause you can take stuff from one side of the Pit to the other in a matter of seconds, and I don’t feel like running a marathon. I’ll still be doing most of the cleaning up there.” He turned his gaze to the floor above him with a grimace. “It would just be cruel to make you handle all those dirty trunks.”

Now that Tank seemed to have returned to normal, Cerin felt that much better, even if some irritating part of their mind was replaying their outburst over and over. They drowned it out by asking, “Won’t the guards see me moving around and tattle to Jolene?”

“Nah, they’ll be keeping their mouths shut. I made sure of that.” Tank had been on his way toward the staircase, but he turned back to them with a smirk and lifted his hand, rubbing his fingers against his thumb.

“I’m pretty sure that’s bribery.” Cerin followed the champion, watching him jump up the stairs.

“Hey, Rawk Hawk did it all the time back in the day, and no one came down on him.”

“Wasn’t Rawk Hawk a reviled jerk ‘back in the day?’”

“Only ‘cause he got caught!”

The two of them made quick work of the chores, finishing with the drudgery in a little over an hour. Cerin was actually thankful the mindless tasks were just that—it was a waste of their time, for sure, but it ate up their infuriated energy, and by the time they were finished they felt much calmer. Again, few words passed between them and Tank. It could have been because he was focusing on working, but they were more inclined to believe he was walking on eggshells, trying not to set them off again.

He thanked them profusely—they wanted to think it was genuine and not out of fear—and sent them on their way. And so, imagining the gloom of Twilight Town, they sank into the shadow they cast and reemerged among the scrubby grass and skeletal trees.

They were drained. But as tempted as they were to immediately crawl into bed, they knew they didn’t have time. As they made their way through town, they traced their cut. Had Marilyn made it home? They hadn’t seen her since yesterday but assumed she had. She wouldn’t have heard the racket Tank made that morning, and he hadn’t given them enough time to find her and tell her about the worrying growth of their injury.  That was priority number one. They couldn’t allow anything else to sidetrack them.

A voice called their name, shrill with panic. They practically screamed themself but managed to hold it back, turning toward the speaker with their hand clamped over their chest. They recognized the blue skin, the puffs of brown hair sticking out from her bonnet, and the usual Twilighter-standard yellow eyes, encircled by shadow. This was Eve, the sirens’ next-door neighbor and a very generous woman who worked tirelessly to support her triplets. The fear on her face as she ran toward them made Cerin’s blood run cold. She was alone.

She came to a screeching halt in front of them, gasping and wringing her hands. “They’re gone!”

“Do you know where?” Cerin asked. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, truthfully, but the older the kids got, the greater their capacity for mischief…the more likely it was that they would get themselves hurt.

Eve confirmed their suspicions. “Someone said they saw them heading east—they’ve heard so many people talking about the trail, they might have—”

“I’ll search it,” Cerin interrupted. Time was of the essence, so they didn’t bother excusing themself before they sank into the shadows below. That, and they couldn’t let Eve see the stricken look on their face.

It took them a moment to calm themself enough to travel through the endless darkness, but they emerged right in the middle of the trail, their mind racing. They knew these kids—they tended to keep to themselves, but they liked Cerin for being the closest in age to them out of anyone in Twilight Town. In truth, the triplets were much older than Cerin, by perhaps eight years even, but mentally Cerin was unquestionably more mature. The perks of being a Shadow Siren.

The kids would probably have the good sense to stay on the path, Cerin hoped. They’d grown up knowing what dangerous things lurked in this forest, and if they had any self-preservation instincts at all, they’d stay out of the wilderness. But that caused problems in and of itself—even the dirt trail crawled with vicious wildlife, Dayzees and Clefts and Hyper Goombas of various persuasions, all of which were very territorial. It was worrying enough that these defenseless children were out here alone without throwing the half-crazed Beldam into the mix too.

Cerin hurried backward through the trail, where the forest was thinner and lighter, hoping the kids hadn’t gone past them already. They listened to the area so hard it hurt, desperate for any clue, but the only thing they heard was the wind in the trees and the distant caw of a crow. Was Marilyn babysitting Beldam again and keeping her out of trouble, or was the rogue siren unsupervised and on the move? If she found the kids before Cerin did…unbidden, a hand snapped into shape out of Cerin’s shadow, and in the same deft motion whipped out against a nearby pine. The bark splintered, shattered pieces of wood showering the siren as they growled in disgust. Their cut flared.

They could call out, but if Beldam was out there, she’d investigate the source of the sound. They’d draw her right to them all. Too risky. Yet the silence was deafening. They couldn’t panic, not now, but it was hard to think over the frantic pounding of their heart. They squeezed their eyes shut, focusing on regulating their breathing and simultaneously hating themself for wasting time this way. There was a rustle of a bush to the side and their concentration broke.

Before they’d even registered what happened, they heard a thump and the telltale gasp of someone whose lungs had been quickly and forcefully deprived of air. They opened their eyes to see a mushroom creature with sickly green skin pinned into the dirt in front of them by a shadow hand. Its fingers were tightening around the Hyper Goomba’s body, ignoring their panicked kicking. Beside the Goomba lay a tiny purple hat with a wicked spike protruding from the top.

Cerin hadn’t even felt themself using their powers a second ago, but they found it hard to be upset given that this Goomba was almost certainly trying to stab them while their eyes were closed. They advanced on the walking fungus with their lips pulled back in a snarl. Their hand twitched, and the fingers of the shadow mimic loosened just enough that the Goomba could take in a shuddering breath.

“You. I’ll spare you if you can tell me where three kid Twilighters went.”

It pleased them how the Goomba’s eyes widened. Through chattering teeth, they wheezed, “The steeple—“

Cerin released them, turning their back on the gasping Goomba and retracing their steps up the trail. Their cut twinged with what felt like every step, or maybe with their pulse, but they barely felt it over the sensation of their magic pulling at their control, fighting to break free. A Crazee Dayzee stepped out of the bushes in front of them, potentially on accident, and a dark hand that burst from Cerin’s shadow punched it hard in the face. Petals flew as the animate flower toppled backward, but Cerin didn’t give it a second glance.

There were silhouettes on the trail ahead. Three of them, about Cerin’s height, round heads on short, stubby bodies. Cerin could have cried with relief. Instead they raised their voice as they approached, a bark of “Hey!” that made all three jump. But the terror on their faces melted away as they recognized the siren, and all three called their name in a chorus.

They rushed to Cerin, looking fearfully over their shoulders as they did so. Cerin looked them over, thanking whatever or whoever was listening that all three kids appeared unhurt. “What are you doing here?” they hissed, remembering at once that there could easily be someone watching.

“It was Umbra’s idea,” one of the kids replied, pointing an accusatory finger at his sister.

“You’re such a snitch!” she whined, shoving his shoulder.

“We heard that the ghosts in the steeple moved into the forest,” the third triplet said, ignoring her siblings’ bickering. Cerin had never been more thankful that their eyes were hidden because they felt one twitch.

The kid continued, blissfully unaware, “We thought that maybe, if we came out here, we’d see Dad…”

“You’d see…?” Cerin answered their own question as they glanced up at the imposing tower of the Creepy Steeple, looming over them all. “Oh.”

“But we didn’t see any ghosts,” Umbra said, crossing her arms and pouting. “Only a bunch of dumb flowers.”

Cerin’s injury was stinging again, but they took it as a warning and kept their voice level as they said, “Those flowers are dangerous. Everything in here is dangerous! You’re _lucky_ you didn’t see any ghosts, or something even worse.”

Now all three kids guiltily looked at each other or at the ground, shuffling their feet. Cerin inhaled and exhaled, hoping it would cool their blood. “Let’s go home. Your mom is worried sick.”

“We’re gonna be grounded for the rest of our lives,” one of them moaned.

“That’ll be plenty of time for you to think about why this was a bad idea,” Cerin retorted as they turned around, leading the children out of the forest. The siren was still tense and on high alert—none of them were out of the woods yet. Thankfully, the kids seemed to have had enough adventure for one day and followed without complaint.

They passed where Cerin had threatened the Goomba, who appeared to have survived the encounter as there was no trace of the scuffle. Cerin let themself relax as the party left the steeple behind, and more twilight fought its way through the thinning woodland. They weren’t too far from town now. Soon all of this would be over.

A shadow flitted in and out of their peripheral vision. Their magic eclipsed their control, and a pair of shadow hands erupted from the ground, eliciting a scream from one of the kids somewhere behind them. They ignored it, training their eyes on the black bark of a pine tree, where they’d seen the movement. Their wound ached and their fury threatened to boil over.

Several long seconds passed. How dare Beldam try to pretend like she wasn’t there when they had just seen her? “I know you’re there!” they snarled, the hands shuddering with their anger. “Show yourself or leave us alone!”

Still nothing. “You coward!” Cerin yelled as the hands descended upon the tree she hid behind. The hands slammed into the tree with a crack that echoed throughout the silent forest. The impact gouged out a sizable chunk of bark, like some beast had taken an experimental bite of the trunk but left the rest standing. And in the next second the hands had uprooted a nearby bush, tossing it to the side like a wad of discarded paper, and ripped up all the grass surrounding the tree. It fell around them like confetti.

Cerin mentally clamped down on the errant magic, and the hands melted away as if nothing had ever happened, even though the damage to the vegetation said otherwise. If Beldam had been there, she certainly wasn’t anymore…she must have warped away. The abnormal bright color of the sapwood peered out of the mangled trunk, a striking testament to Cerin’s loss of control. If Lillian saw this, she’d have a conniption.

Cerin turned around to face the triplets, and the shame that had been starting to brew flooded them when they saw their expressions. All three were huddled together, watching with wide eyes. The oldest, Umbra, seemed to collect herself and asked in a voice that nevertheless quivered, “Cerin, I don’t think anyone was there.”

Cerin squeezed their eyes shut, a pitiful defense against the determined panging of their wound. They’d scared these kids half to death. _What is wrong with me?_

They straightened themself up, trying to act natural, like nothing was wrong. “You might be right,” they said out loud. “I’m…a little jumpy. I told you this forest is dangerous…but I’m sorry for scaring you.”

The kids gave each other side glances, but they seemed to at least accept the apology at face value, as they came apart from each other and their fear gave way to curiosity. “How’d you do that?” asked the middle one as he approached, scrutinizing Cerin a little more closely than they would have preferred.

“You’re bleeding,” said the youngest, pointing at their chest. Cerin immediately clapped a hand over their wound and bit back a groan at the pain.

“I’m fine,” they ground out. “Just a scratch. Come on, we need to get out of here quick.”

The kids were quiet the rest of the trek through the trail, which was less exciting, though Cerin swore they saw more shadows dancing in the corners of their eyes. But they kept it together, remembering Tank’s open-mouthed shock and the terror in the triplets’ eyes every time they felt tempted to lash out. The reminders, while sobering, made their stomach lurch.

Eve, thank the stars, was waiting just outside the wooden gate of Twilight Town. The kids recognized her before Cerin did and rushed her all at once, practically knocking her over. Cerin smiled as Eve scooped all three of them into a tight hug, though their chest ached again, and this time they didn’t think it was from their cut.

As they approached the family, Eve turned to them with tears in her eyes. “Cerin, I couldn’t possibly thank you enough—“

“No need,” Cerin said, shaking their head. “I couldn’t not help. Don’t feel like you owe me anything.”

“But you’re hurt,” Eve said with a glance down at their chest. “Oh, goodness, that looks awful.”

For the first time Cerin looked down at themself and recoiled, just barely managing to catch themself before they swore in front of the kids. There was no question now: the cut had grown. It sliced downward from their right shoulder to their left side, and was now wide enough that blood ran in rivulets down their abdomen. They wiped at it with their hands but succeeded mostly in smearing it across their skin and staining their gloves.

“You must let me help,” Eve pleaded. “It’s my fault I made you go out there, the least I could do is—“

“No no no, I’m fine, really,” Cerin said, backing away. Was this contagious? They got it from Beldam, they could _not_ risk giving it to anyone else. “This is from before, it’s not your fault, I should really be going!”

With a speed that surprised even themself, they blazed past the family and into the rest of town, their arm pressed against their wound. They got a few stares from passing Twilighters, but they didn’t care, only stopping when they’d thrown open the door to their house and slammed it behind them, leaning against it as they caught their breath. With each inhalation, the cut stung.

If Beldam was out and about, that meant Marilyn wasn’t supervising her. She must be home now. Cerin looked around, expecting to see her on the couch in front of the TV, but it wasn’t on and the room was empty. They shambled through the back hallway, pushing open the door to her and Vivian’s room, but it, too, was vacant. They burst through the doors to the bathroom and their own room (as if Marilyn had any business being in there), but they had no choice but to accept that they were alone in the house.

They dragged themself back out to the front room, where a note lying on the kitchen table caught their eye.

_C:_

_Out babysitting B. Don’t get in too much trouble. Will try to be back soon but you never can tell with her._

_-M_

It was unclear how long ago it was written, but the ink was dry. She hadn’t just left. If she’d been out there with Beldam the whole time, Beldam wouldn’t have been roaming around. They stared at the piece of paper in their hands, reading it over and over as if it would provide them some additional clues. Then the shadows flickered in their peripheral, against the warm kitchen light. Their grip tightened without their input and the paper tore in half.

“I’m going crazy.”

They could try to seek out Marilyn now, but not only were they unsure they could find the old house on their own, even thinking about coming face to face with Beldam again made their blood boil and their wound sting so much it threatened to bring tears to their eyes.

They had one final resort. Dropping the scraps of paper, they closed their eyes, painting a picture in their mind of a tropical island, with sandy beaches and lush, undisturbed jungle. If they concentrated hard enough, they could taste the salt on the air, feel the grit of the sand and the endless heat of the sun. The shadows pooled where they were attached to the ground. Holding their breath, they descended.

Cerin had nicknamed it the void. They weren’t entirely sure what it actually was, and though they’d asked the older sirens how it worked, they’d only received shrugs in response. Whatever it was, they imagined the vacuum of space felt similar: cold, completely dark, and utterly silent. It was a space only accessible by Shadow Sirens, and while others could enter it temporarily, they couldn’t swim through the shadows and appear somewhere else like a siren could. Cerin clung to the image they’d conceived, feeling the familiar rushing sensation as if they were whipping through wind or water at an unimaginable speed.

Then something grabbed them and they felt themself scream.

Their mental picture slipped away as they thrashed, feeling as if hundreds, thousands of tiny fingers were crawling all over them, wriggling themselves into the wound on their chest, pulling their very mind apart. They’d stopped moving, they were lost, their heartbeat hammered in their ears, _home, home, **home**_

They burst from the shadows, faceplanting onto something hard and cold, not the hardwood floors of their house nor the dirt and sand of Keelhaul Key. With a groan, they picked themself up, noticing first the dusty gray stone, and then the pangs of nausea. They pulled themself into a sitting position and stared wide-eyed at the chamber they’d fallen into. Collapsed columns lay discarded along the floor. The ceiling was high, ensuring a persistent echo. Raised platforms faced each other on opposite walls, both divided down the middle by a barbed fence. In the very center of the room was a pedestal, and beyond that a great door. It was a faded scarlet with gold trimmings along the edge, outlining the shapes of seven stars. Enormous fissures in the wall that contained it were the only hint of it having ever being opened.

“This isn’t home,” they said. The chamber mockingly brought their words back to them, and they seethed. “This isn’t _home!”_

Their powers snapped to life, and the shadow hands waged war on anything they could reach. Cerin stood still as their magic threw itself against the stone, crumbling the fallen pillars, cracking the platforms, drawing long grooves in the ground. They couldn’t control it. They didn’t want to.

The whirlwind of destruction only died down when they came back to themself, breathing hard and clenching their fists as if unsure their hands still worked. The shadows melted, and Cerin was left surrounded by piles of broken rock and clouds of dust. They were sure their injury was panging again, though it was difficult to tell over the chill of fear that was snaking its way through their body, numbing everything except the racing of their heart.

_I’m a danger to myself and others. I can’t be around anyone._

There were no other options. They stood up, pulling their hat low over their eyes as they staggered toward the platform on the far end of the room. They thought of nothing as they traveled through Rogueport Sewers, alone and exhausted.

-

Silence ruled the run-down former house. It wasn’t a particularly comfortable one; it was one that happened when the conversation had run dry and no one felt like picking it back up. Beldam had been trying to get a read on her younger sister, seated beside her, but Marilyn was as aloof as ever, like she always was when something was bothering her. So Beldam gave up and instead turned her attention toward clearing her mind, trying to erase all the constant irking thoughts that buzzed like flies in her head. But a noise at the more “open” end of her miserable hovel shattered her concentration. She turned, bristling, but her hostility vanished when she saw the intruder. Without taking her eyes off the newcomer, she jabbed Marilyn hard in the stomach.

He looked half-dead already, his shoulders slumped and his head low to his chest. Spreading outward from said chest was a horrible gash, ringed with dried blood. In its very center was the thinnest sliver of white that practically glowed in the dark depths of the forest. Beldam’s stomach flipped over, though she dared not show it. Still, the instinctive feeling that something was amiss was impossible to ignore, even more so when she felt the kid staring right at her, his hidden eyes boring into hers.

“Hi, guys,” he slurred, his voice faint and tremulous. “I’m home.”

 Then, on cue, he swayed and collapsed face-first into the rubble.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FUN FACT this is technically the most canon-contradictory chapter i've ever written and it's entirely because of eve and her family. i played through ttyd recently and it turns out that if you tattle eve before she gets turned into a pig in chapter 4 goombella refers to all three kids as her sons. that's literally the only time that detail is mentioned, her tattle is different after that and never genders the kids again. similarly it's also mentioned in passing that her husband/the kids' father isn't dead he's just gone all the time or something. i didn't know either of these details when i first wrote this and i didn't think it was worth it to rewrite, so either forgive me for ignoring said minuscule canon or allow me to handwave it (two of the kids are trans and their dad died between the events of ttyd and this fic ~3 years later)
> 
> ALSO congrats this is the last chapter to take place from cerin's pov you made it through what's probably the worst part of the fic


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and now for something completely different (but not really)
> 
> as i said before i play a lot more with povs in this fic, there will be another switch next chapter. i'm on the precipice of finals week so once that's over and i'm on break expect another upload or two before my next semester starts.

Vivian had never imagined she’d miss the gloom and doom of Twilight Town, but here she was. The cool atmosphere soothed her skin, unhappy after so much time spent in the sun, and the darkness and lurking shadows gave her eyes a much-needed rest. She nodded to some familiar faces she passed, but the Twilighters all seemed to be giving her funny looks. Her self-consciousness quickly eclipsed her newfound confidence and she dropped her eyes to the ground instead.

The house was exactly how she’d left it, which made her feel a little better. She shut the door behind her with a click, relieved at its familiarity. After so much time in a brand new place, there was nothing quite like coming home. The front room was empty, both the kitchen table and the couch unoccupied. “Cerin?” she called through the house, not particularly surprised when she didn’t receive an answer. She hadn’t told anyone when she was coming back. They were off running an errand or doing whatever else they did, probably.

Her and Marilyn’s bedroom door was ajar. She peered inside and smiled when she saw her sister passed out on her bed, an open book covering her face. Other books littered the bed and ground beside her. Vivian raised an eyebrow. She knew Marilyn was something of a voracious reader, but not quite to this extent. She debated letting her sleep more but decided she missed her too much to wait and approached the bed, pulling gently at her elbow.

Marilyn stirred and pushed the book off her face, letting it fall to the floor. She rolled over to face Vivian, her eyes coming into focus and widening. In the next second, Vivian was snatched up in a bear hug that threatened to snap her in half.

“Missed you too, sis,” she wheezed, patting her sister on the shoulder twice. Marilyn obediently released her, giving Vivian a moment to catch her breath. Her older sister looked so terrible it caught Vivian off-guard—there were dark circles under her eyes and smudges of dirt on her gloves. At once she had the feeling that something had gone horribly wrong.

"What happened?" she signed, making Marilyn’s tiny smile fall instantly. Her eyes flicked to the left and right, as if she were searching for an escape route. Then she gave a heavy, reluctant sigh.

"Shit hit the fan."

Vivian absorbed her ensuing explanation with rapt attention and significant anxiety. By the time Marilyn had wrapped up, she had both hands covering her mouth and her heart beating so hard in her chest it felt like it would crack her ribs.

"I’ve been trying to learn what I could," Marilyn said, indicating the piles of discarded books, "but nothing I’ve gotten my hands on has been of any help. There’s no recorded documentation of anything like this. I guess that’s not surprising."

Vivian nodded, trying not to let her fear cloud her higher thinking. "I think we have one last way to figure out what this is."

Marilyn raised her eyebrows. She made an L-shape with the thumb and finger of her right hand and pressed it to her chin. Vivian tried not to smile as she nodded.

"But before we visit the island, I’m going to our old place," she signed. Marilyn winced but Vivian didn’t let her protest, continuing, "You need to rest anyway. I’ll be fine, I promise."

Marilyn heaved another sigh but made no attempt to argue. "Be safe. If you’re not back soon, I’ll come get you myself."

Vivian smiled, for real this time. It was good to be home, with family who cared. She leaned in to give Marilyn another hug, without the stronger siren crushing her like a soda can.

"One more thing," Marilyn said as she let her go. "You’ll want to walk. It’s changed since we’ve last seen it."

"Changed how?" Vivian asked, but Marilyn shook her head and swept the rest of the books off her bed. The conversation was over; Marilyn never wasted her time explaining something to someone if they would soon see it for themselves. Vivian sighed but slipped out of the room and back into town, where the villagers gave her a wide berth.

Even though she hadn’t visited her old haunt in years, she didn’t even have to think about the path she was taking, it was so ingrained in her muscle memory. But she’d forgotten how dark and cold the woods became the further from town one traveled, especially off the trail. It was as if the forest itself were trying its best to dissuade would-be trespassers, and would swallow them whole if its warning went ignored. But Vivian figured she’d earned the right to be considered an inhabitant after hiding here among the pines for centuries.

Finally, just as she was beginning to wonder if she’d forgotten the way after all, the silhouette of a run-down house loomed into view. She nearly gasped aloud at it—Marilyn’s assertion that it had changed was a little bit of an understatement. Their former home had never been the prettiest or the sturdiest structure, but at least the last time Vivian had seen it, all four walls were standing. Now one of them had collapsed, taking a substantial part of the roof with it. The rest of the weathered stone in the walls didn’t look like it would last much longer.

She hadn’t missed this place, not after she’d been given a home where the roof didn’t leak and she didn’t have to fight spiders over floorspace to sleep on. But to see it in such disrepair made something pang in her chest.

She crept through the remnants of the fallen wall, and her breath hitched in her throat. Two dark shapes leaned against the walls. One was entirely enveloped in the furthest corner, under the protection of the roof. The other was closer to the collapsed wall, barely in the shade of the overhang. The whiteness of her affected arm was unnatural, sickening, but even without that particular characteristic Vivian would recognize this person anywhere. A familiar wave of anxiety crashed over her—what she wasn’t expecting was the warmth of relief, too, subtle but very much there. The shape moved, picking her head up to fix her with an accusing glare.

“I suppose you’re here for _him,”_ Beldam said, the malice with which she spoke the final word unmistakable.

Vivian’s throat had gone dry, but she swallowed and spoke without a tremor, “I’m here for you too.”

Beldam sniffed. Vivian imagined she was rolling her eyes. “Best be careful with that one, dear sister,” she said, the sinister smile she wore more audible than visible. “You think I’m bad, wait ‘till you see him. He’s himself maybe half the time.”

Vivian tried not to frown, but the more she considered Beldam’s words, the more they rubbed her the wrong way. She could be lying…but warning Vivian of a real danger in this backhanded way was also something she’d do, no doubt. So instead she decided to fight the battle she could. “You know they’re not a he.”

Now Beldam definitely looked upon her with contempt. “The two of us are on the brink of certain death and you’re choosing to argue with me about pronouns?”

“They’re as much of a he as I am,” Vivian snapped, a flare of heat traveling down her arms where it pooled in her fists. Her own resistance, the fire that was a moment away from gathering in her palms, was comforting in a way she’d rarely experienced. She locked eyes with Beldam, daring the older siren to challenge her.

Beldam looked away first, a noise of annoyance escaping her gritted teeth. “When did you grow a backbone?” she murmured, so quietly it was as if she didn’t want Vivian to hear.

Satisfied, Vivian turned her attention to the rest of the crumbling shelter. It was pitiful, seeing it this way…her throat tightened, but she knew this wasn’t the time to mourn what had been. She took a few careful steps forward, feeling Beldam’s eyes follow her.

“Don’t get too close,” she rasped. “We’re contagious to some degree.”

Vivian didn’t need to be reminded to keep her distance, but she nodded anyway, and Beldam slumped back against the wall as if merely sitting up straight exhausted her. The other shape in the corner shifted, as if sensing Vivian’s approach. They had maybe been lying on the ground but picked themself up, their movement slow and deliberate, as if they were made of glass and expecting themself to break. It didn’t take long for Vivian to see why. There was a giant, gaping wound slashing downward across their chest, its very center the same revolting white as Beldam’s arm.

“Vivian?” Cerin croaked, their voice as dusty and unstable as the walls surrounding them. “Is it really you, or am I hallucinating again?”

“No, it’s me. I’m here.” Vivian smiled despite her heart breaking.

“I’m sorry about this,” they murmured, dropping their eyes from her to the ground. Their hat was gone and they understandably hadn’t bothered keeping their hair in their face. They were normally so meticulous about those things, though.

“Don’t be. It’s not your fault,” she said.

“Exactly,” came the low voice of Beldam from the side. “It’s mine, isn’t that right?”

Cerin shot her a glare from across the room, and the tension in the atmosphere got so thick Vivian felt as if it were inserting its clammy fingers into her throat.

“No one said—“ she started, but Beldam was talking over her. “None of this would have happened had you kept to yourself! But no, you had to interfere, and now you’re unhappy with the consequences.”

“I couldn’t pretend like this wasn’t happening!” Cerin protested. The glittering of anger in their eyes was chilling, even more so when they advanced toward Beldam, their left hand on their opposite shoulder so their arm covered their chest. “But you know what? You’re right. I should’ve just left you to die alone!”

“That’s what I told you!” Beldam snarled, rising as well. Another rush of heat coursed through Vivian, this one more panicked than angry.

“Stop, please!” she cried, backing away from the two sirens as they drew nearer. Every instinct was telling her to get between them, Cerin would never risk attacking her and even Beldam would be hesitant to throw the first punch, but what use would she be if she caught the affliction herself? “Pointing fingers isn’t going to help anyone!”

Her plea at least diffused Cerin’s temper, as they gave their head a quick shake and retreated into their corner. Beldam scowled, but she, too, seated herself again.

“Why are you here, anyway?” she muttered. Vivian assumed it was directed at her. “I’m not on my deathbed just yet. Neither is the brat.”

“I was worried,” Vivian said, hating the defensiveness that crept into her tone. “Marilyn could only describe so much,” she added.

Beldam grunted, a noncommittal noise of acknowledgement. “Well, here we are.” She spread her arms, giving Vivian an uncensored view of the _thing_ creeping up her body. It was all she could do not to shudder.

“Hideous, isn’t it?” Beldam dropped her volume, adopting a conspiratorial whisper. “Believe it or not, your ward over there I feel is much worse off. Mentally, at least. The damage may be warping my body, but it’s absolutely ravaging his mind. You caught him in one of his more lucid moments—most of the time he doesn’t know where he is, or who he is.”

Vivian listened to her sister with careful guardedness. Beldam was never honest if she could stand to gain something, anything, through lying. But she wasn’t much of a storyteller. Even the things she fabricated had some baseline of truthfulness to them. Usually.

Vivian prompted, “What about you?”

“What _about_ me?” Beldam picked her head up and gave Vivian another glare. Now that she was closer, Vivian could see something impossibly black inching up the side of her face, like she’d had paint thrown on her. It was cradling her right eye, and the icy blue iris shone out of her face like a star in the night sky. “Are you implying I don’t know what I’m doing at all times? I’ve killed for lesser slights than that.”

Vivian pulled a face and Beldam relented, dropping her eyes to the ground for a moment. “Fine. Between you and me…sometimes I lose myself too. But not for long, and not nearly as often.” She glanced up, silently daring Vivian to disagree. Then she softened. “It’s easier to remember who I am when there’s someone to talk to. But he’s not a very good conversational partner. Most likely because we hate each other.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Vivian said, giving her a tiny smile that she couldn’t quite rid of any sadness. Beldam’s lips twitched in response, but then she looked away, her good hand tightening around her bad arm.

“You knew I was here the whole time. You must have. Where else would I have gone?”

The question was said so quietly, so innocently, yet Vivian flinched away as if Beldam had shouted it instead—she wished she had.

“We—we thought…” she said, but Beldam raised her good hand and cut her off.

“No. You didn’t. Not for a moment.” Beldam held her gaze as Vivian tried not to squirm. “Don’t lie to me, Vivian. Neither of you even came here to see me.”

“We couldn’t,” Vivian protested, her nerves tightening her voice enough that it threatened to crack. “If we so much as implied to Cerin that we knew where you might be—“

“Really? That’s your excuse?” There was something vulnerable in Beldam’s tone that made Vivian’s stomach twist on itself. She’d rather die than show any weakness. She always had to have the upper hand. “Sneaking out undetected is what we _do._ Furthermore, I was here years before he was so much as a puddle of shadow in that old church. Why can’t you just say you were avoiding me?”

Vivian braced herself. From centuries of experience, she knew this prelude would inevitably lead to Beldam tearing her down until she was nothing. But then her fire returned, chasing away the chill that intended to consume her. She didn’t have to endure this anymore.

“Fine. You’re right. I was avoiding you.” Her words came out solid, unwavering. “You shouldn’t be wondering why. You always do this! No matter what happens, you always end up calling me worthless and stupid! Why would I want to see you when you only want me around to have someone to blame?”

Her hands were uncomfortably warm, her magic right there at her fingertips, pulsating in tandem with her heartbeat. The shock in Beldam’s icy eyes only made it easier to keep talking.

“I haven’t told you anything you don’t already know. You need to accept that you can’t control me anymore. I’m here now because I chose to be, not because you told me to.” She took in a measured breath, mostly to calm the continuing heat that begged her for release. “When you realize that, maybe I’ll visit more often.”

Beldam didn’t move as Vivian turned away. She left her there, unable to let herself even look back, as she approached Cerin’s corner. The young siren looked for a moment like they were asleep, but when she stopped a safe few feet away they cracked open an eye, revealing a dusky purple iris otherwise swallowed by shadow. Their arms covered their chest, hiding the glowing white flesh from view.

“You really ripped her a new one,” they muttered, the faintest ghost of laughter haunting their tone.

“I did?” A shy smile appeared on Vivian’s face despite herself. “I could have said much worse…”

“No, that was more than enough.” Cerin’s teeth flashed in the moonlight for a moment, it could have been a grin or a grimace of pain. “Coming from you? She’ll be feeling that for a while. I wish I could’ve seen the look on her face.”

Vivian laughed quietly but stopped when Cerin coughed. “How are you holding up?”

“Me? I’m fine.”

The response was automatic and exactly what she expected. She crossed her arms.

“Okay, it’s been rough,” they admitted. “But, like, I _died_ once, it’s not quite as bad as that.”

  _Yet._ Neither said it, but somehow the omission was even louder than if they had.

“I know Beldam can’t exactly be trusted, but…” Vivian trailed off, wishing there were an easier way to phrase this. “She seems to think you’re…rarely in your right mind.”

“Yeah, well, she’s one to talk,” Cerin grumbled, their eyes narrowing. “If she’s so lucid all the time, why was she wandering around in the forest? Why’d she attack me in the first place?” They cut themself off with a groan, and Vivian tensed.

“Let’s just say there’s…a reason we’re out here away from everyone else,” they muttered after a moment, their voice strained.

“We’ll find a way to fix it,” Vivian said, recognizing the vulnerability beneath the vagueness. “Marilyn and I are going to the island soon. Maybe one of them will know what to do.”

“Maybe.” Cerin didn’t even bother trying to sound convinced. Vivian found it hard to blame them.

“In the meantime, Beldam said that talking helps remind her who she is. I know it’s a lot to ask, but…”

“You want us to _talk_ to each other?” Now Cerin turned their glare on her. “She tried to kill us not too long ago, in case you forgot.”

Vivian bit her lip, glancing away briefly. “This isn’t what you want to hear, I’m sure, but…I don’t think that was entirely her doing. She was so _off_ when we saw her before…but this is the most normal I’ve seen her since. And she never endangered me or Marilyn before she started…you know, using…”

“Don’t make excuses for her. You’re better than that.” They were looking at her like she’d lost her mind, but when their eyes shifted from side to side, she knew they were considering her words. “Besides,” they said a minute later, “we’re on opposite sides of _everything._ There’s nothing we could talk about that won’t end in bloodshed.”

“Even if it’s for your own good?” Vivian pressed. “Neither of you want to succumb to this entirely. If I could stand to be around her for a thousand years…”

Though Cerin continued scowling at her, she knew she’d won them over. They gave a grumbling kind of sigh that sounded too aged and world-weary to come from someone who was really only two years old. “I’ll try, but don’t expect success.”

“Making the effort is good enough.” Vivian put on another smile to mask the pity that was beginning to warp into guilt. Of course all of this happened while she’d been gone. If she had been here, would that have changed anything…?

She didn’t get to ponder it for very long, as something changed in Cerin’s demeanor. Their visible pupil dilated so that it filled almost their entire iris, and they sat up abruptly, scanning their surroundings with an uneasy kind of twitchiness. The shadows that surrounded them seemed to be rippling—their powers were coming to life. Vivian jumped back, feeling heat gather on her fingers.

“Oh, this again?” Beldam groaned from somewhere behind her. “He’s lost, Vivian. Go home. No point in trying to talk him out of it, he’ll come down by himself. Maybe.”

“You’re sure?” Vivian watched Cerin’s eyes flick from Beldam to herself as each sister spoke. Their breath was coming out ragged and unevenly.

“No,” Beldam said. “Go, before he hurts you.”

“I’d _never,”_ Cerin snapped, their voice hoarse. The shadows stilled somewhat as they spoke, though the glare they leveled at Beldam made Vivian’s blood run cold. “Talking about me like I’m not here…”

“You’re terrified that you will. It’s obvious. Sit down before you do something you regret.” To Vivian, Beldam lifted her head an inch, giving her younger sister a significant _look._ “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”

“I, uh, yeah, right.” The tension in the old house was getting unbearable again, and Beldam had given her a clear out. Vivian gave Cerin one final glance before imagining her—their—home and slipping away.

-

The tropical Keelhaul Key was, in truth, not Vivian’s ideal place to live. It was beautiful, no doubt, she was always enamored with the ocean lapping against the shore and the vibrant plants of the near-infinite jungle. But it was too hot, and too bright in the daytime, and she had some baggage regarding the area. This marked the first place she’d ever been without her sisters, surrounded by near-strangers who had every reason to distrust her. But they all treated her with such unconditional kindness anyway. She missed traveling with them more than almost anything…she still saw them regularly, but it wasn’t the same.

It was evening when she and Marilyn appeared and fought their way through the jungle as the sun fell beyond the watery horizon. The humid atmosphere had absorbed the day’s heat, though, and Vivian’s hair clung to the back of her neck and shoulders like yet another suffocating layer. She’d never been more thankful to stumble upon a clearing in the heart of the jungle, Marilyn close behind.

“Hello?” she called, just to be polite. There was a shack on the opposite side of the clearing, tied in with the natural jungle flora. Ivy sprouted from its wooden walls, vines wrapping around all they could reach. Within moments there was movement in the open doorway, and out stepped a slender siren about Vivian’s height, her wavy green hair tumbling down her back. She looked confused until she caught sight of the sisters and her face lit up.

“Oh! It’s you two. We weren’t expecting visitors.” She looked at Marilyn, and, pausing briefly to think about it, brought her hand up to her forehead and gave a saluting motion. Marilyn grinned and repeated the sign.

“There wasn’t much time to warn you,” Vivian said, peering over Lillian’s shoulder to the shack behind her. “Where’s…?”

“She’s in there,” Lillian said dismissively. “You’ll have to excuse her, she’s feeling a bit under the weather.”

Vivian felt herself blanch. “How…how so?”

“Just a cold, nothing serious. Her immune system has to catch up on fifty years of absence.” Lillian tilted her head, a frown tugging at her lips. “Should we be more worried?”

Vivian bit her lip, exchanging a nervous glance with Marilyn. “I mean…maybe…I don’t know. We need to ask her something, that’s why we came here…”

Lillian eyed her with obvious suspicion, but turned around to duck inside the shack, beckoning the sisters to follow.

Unfortunately, their home was not bigger on the inside—it only housed two sirens, after all. They shared a bed, a cot-like structure made of wood and stuffed with various plant materials. On the opposite wall was a wooden table with a pair of chairs. There wasn’t much room for anything else. Vivian crammed herself between the furniture, trying not to appear anxious in front of the oldest and most powerful Shadow Siren seated at the table.

Cerin the First still exuded a venerable aura, even when ill. She shared a name and much of her appearance with the younger: the same shaggy black hair, the same piercing purple eyes. Though they were hidden behind her hair at this moment, Vivian could just tell when she was glancing her over and tried not to shiver despite the heat. Luckily, Cerin then looked to Marilyn, who was standing more near the doorway. “I believe you’re missing someone,” she said, her voice even lower than usual, and having a scratchiness indicative of whatever minor sickness she’d contracted. “Where’s Junior?”

Vivian winced in lieu of answering, and Cerin scowled at her silence. “Out with it.”

“I, um…they’re sick,” Vivian said, trying not to stumble over her words and failing. “It’s really bad. Marilyn and I have never seen anything like it before and we don’t know what to do…”

Marilyn tapped her shoulder, dropping something into her hands when she turned. She stared at it for a moment, then glanced up at her older sister with an accusatory frown. “Where did you get this?” she asked aloud, forgetting to sign.

"I came prepared," Marilyn replied flippantly.

“What is that?” Lillian, seated next to Cerin, leaned over to look.

“It’s Cerin’s Mailbox SP. _Someone_ pilfered it from their room.” Vivian flipped open the device, greeted immediately by a bright screen. “They use it to have better contact with the people they run errands for,” she explained, noticing that its photo gallery was open. This thing could take pictures? They must have bought a more advanced model than what she was familiar with…she flipped through the gallery, watching the images of the two afflicted sirens pass her by. Two things stood out: the bluish glinting of some membrane in their eyes against the light of the camera, and the eerie whiteness of Beldam’s arm and Cerin’s chest, contrasted incredibly by their dark surroundings. Marilyn’s photography skills were perhaps not the greatest, but it captured the damage in a way that Vivian didn’t trust herself to properly describe.

“Marilyn thinks it’s better that we show you what’s happening.” She passed it on to the two seated sirens, Cerin taking it from her and squinting at its screen as Lillian peered over her shoulder. A moment passed, and Lillian gasped out loud. Cerin’s eyes went wide, but then she scowled, the light of the screen drawing deep shadows across her face.

“That’s Beldam,” Lillian said with palpable disgust. “I didn’t even know she was alive…and what’s that _thing_ on her?”

“On them both,” Cerin said, closing the device with a snap. She slid it back across the table with the tips of her fingers, as if she were afraid to touch it for too long.

“We were hoping that…you’d seen something like it before,” Vivian said.

Lillian shook her head, but Cerin folded her arms, her gaze drifting away from the faces of the surrounding sirens and landing on some nondescript part of the wall.

“I have,” she said after a moment, her voice sounding as distant as her eyes. “Or something much like it, anyway.” She sighed, turning back to face the others. The scar trailing down the right side of her face, while not as stark as the white wounds on the infected sirens, was similar enough that Vivian’s stomach turned.

“It more than resembles the affliction that destroyed the Shadow Queen’s physical form.”

The room was silent. Vivian was too stunned to move until Marilyn nudged her, and frowned at the translation. _What is she talking about?_

“We thought the heroes destroyed her body,” Vivian said. “That’s what all the legends say.”

“You’re more inclined to believe a legend from surface-dwellers over someone who watched it happen with their own eyes?” Cerin asked, tilting her head in what was probably sarcastic confusion.

“Cerin, honestly, you’re just as much of a ‘surface-dweller’ as anyone else on this earth,” scolded Lillian. “And you know neither of them would know.”

“I’m just saying,” Cerin said semi-defensively, shrugging even as Lillian delivered her a (somewhat toothless) glare. She turned back to the sisters, running her fingers along her scar. “You can’t expect a mere myth to be correct in all its details. They all refer to the Queen as a demon, for example. Though I suppose that particular legend is correct on a technicality—the heroes did destroy her body. But only what was left of it. There wasn’t much.”

“How did the Queen get it?” Vivian asked, reasonably certain she already knew the answer.

Cerin gave a huff of derisive laughter. “What do you think? She gave herself up so entirely to the forces of black magic, it dissolved her body. Any sorcerer with half a brain would have long stopped toying with it before that point, but she decided that the loss of her form was a necessary sacrifice, if it meant she could continue building her empire. She based me—the entire Shadow Siren species—off what she saw happening to her.”

“And it looked like that?” Lillian asked this time, pointing to the device in the center of the table.

For the first time, Cerin looked uneasy. She glanced down at the table and then back up, absently tracing her scar again. “I…truthfully, I don’t really remember what it looked like on her. It’s been so hard to remember things that happened before she fell, especially since the accident. I’m not comparing those pictures to my memories, it’s more of…a feeling. Instinct, almost.” She shrugged. “Even if I did have a crystal-clear image of her, I doubt it would look exactly the same. It makes sense for it to affect Shadow Sirens differently than it does humans, I think.”

Vivian nodded along until Cerin’s final words. “Wait, what do you mean—“

“What I want to know,” Cerin interrupted, meeting Vivian’s eyes, “is how those two managed to contract it.”

“Beldam, obviously,” Lillian jumped in. Vivian nodded as Marilyn took over, recounting the tale as Vivian translated. By the end, Lillian was bristling, but Cerin looked more contemplative than anything.

“I’m not at all surprised,” she said. “Black magic is…addictive in the worst way. It clings to you…especially after you’ve used it for so long, like she has. It’s no wonder she failed to stop it before it began consuming her.”

“But she gave it to Cerin…the other one, I mean,” Vivian said. “They’ve never used magic like that…I don’t think.”

“You’d think wrong.” Cerin shook her head. “They’re capable of using it, just as I am. You remember how they took the Stars from the Queen after her second resurrection, don’t you?”

Vivian bit her lip, unwanted memories of the Palace of Shadow creeping through her mind. “I try not to…”

Cerin nodded in what may have been sympathy. “They may have only used it once, but once is enough. That single use made them susceptible to it, and then she—Beldam—attacked them. I confess I don’t understand the mechanisms of how such a transmission occurred, but…I suppose it doesn’t matter. Though it would be worth looking into if we had the time and the resources…”

Her volume lowered enough that she was muttering to herself, and Lillian nudged her to snap her out of it.

Marilyn elbowed Vivian again and asked a question she didn’t want to give a voice to. But both Lillian and Cerin were looking at her expectantly, awaiting a translation.

“She asked if…if it’s fatal.”

The two older sirens met each other’s eyes with grim expressions, and Vivian tensed like an electric shock had coursed through her.

“I don’t know,” Cerin said after what seemed like an eternity. “It wasn’t terminal for the Queen, per se, it just made her easier to destroy…though even after that she wasn’t truly dead. But we don’t know if it’ll affect them the same way…” She lapsed into a coughing fit, turning away as Lillian placed a worried hand on her shoulder.

“Then we need a cure,” Vivian said when the eldest siren’s attack subsided.

“What about the Stars?” Lillian asked. “I know one of them explicitly has healing as a function.”

“Sapphire,” Cerin said. “I wouldn’t get my hopes up. If the Queen thought she could reverse the damage using the Crystal Stars, which I might remind you she created herself, I’m certain she would have.”

“But there has to be something we can do,” Vivian pleaded, feeling as if she were deflating like a balloon. Cerin met her with exhausted eyes.

“If I have some epiphany, you’ll be the first to know. In the meantime, keep a close eye on them…Beldam too, I suppose.” She placed a hand on her throat as she swallowed hard. “You’re really keeping the two of them together in that shambles of a house? Tensions would be high even if they didn’t despise each other. You’ll be lucky if they haven’t killed each other by the time you next check.”

“Neither of them are exactly in fighting condition,” pointed out Lillian. “Though I agree, something bad happening feels like an inevitability…could we maybe bring Cerin here instead?”

"They can’t warp," Marilyn signed immediately. "Someone would have to escort them the long way."

“I don’t think the heat would be very good for them,” Vivian said, still very conscious of the muggy air and how she felt as if she were trying to breathe soup.

“That would be a disaster,” Cerin said, shaking her head vigorously. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t want to be around them—either of them. If Beldam passed it on to Junior, it stands to reason that I would be able to get it too. You two,” she pointed at the sisters, “will probably be fine, though. You can’t use black magic, it’s just not within your abilities…as far as we know. I would still use immense caution just in case.”

Vivian hadn’t really planned to do anything reckless, but she nodded anyway. Satisfied, Cerin exhaled slowly, which led to another coughing fit.

“We’ll keep in touch,” Lillian said as she squeezed Cerin’s shoulder. “If either of us can do anything to help, don’t hesitate.”

Vivian couldn’t help but find herself glad to be dismissed. She fled into the shadows, appearing back at home with Marilyn close behind. She breathed deeply, letting the welcoming coolness wash over her. Marilyn, meanwhile, seemed lost in thought.

"At least we know it probably won’t kill them."

“I guess,” Vivian mumbled, accidentally out loud.

"It might be nice to let them know that." Marilyn held her gaze for a moment, then said, "I’ll go. You seem tired."

Vivian considered arguing, but it was true that the day’s activities had wiped her out. Besides, she didn’t really want to face Beldam again, not even with marginally good news. And Marilyn wouldn’t have taken no for an answer anyway. Vivian gave her a grateful smile instead.

But when Marilyn left, the house seemed barren. Desolate. It reminded Vivian of the times before, right after the Shadow Queen’s first defeat, when Beldam had vanished and Marilyn was always in and out and Cerin didn’t even exist yet. After Vivian had spent every waking moment surrounded by friends, busy with adventure, suddenly being so isolated was jarring. The loneliness had sneaked up on her, just as it was threatening to do now. She wandered the empty rooms, wishing there was something that caught her interest—the night was young, after all. But when she accidentally glanced at Cerin’s open door and felt a jolt like she’d instead looked at their tombstone, she gave up and went to bed.

Maybe tomorrow would be better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a note on marilyn: i am not deaf and i am, unfortunately, american, so all of my research has been on asl. i'm taking a lot of artistic liberties regarding her dialogue because i'm far from fluent (though i'm trying to teach myself) and grammar in asl is so drastically different from that of spoken english. i'm sure i've written her as using phrases that don't exist in asl and i apologize, i'm really going more for the intent of her words than any literal translation. that said i'm not just entirely bullshitting, if i do have her sign something specific i've done my research to ensure it actually means what i want it to. for example the sign she gives vivian means "lesbian" (in context it makes sense) and the sign she exchanges with lillian is (obviously) "hello." so yeah if you think i could do something better in this regard i'm very much open to suggestions.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ehhh this was kind of meant to be two separate chapters and it's probably obvious but i thought they were too short on their own so i slapped them together.
> 
> you might notice that marilyn's dialogue is no longer italicized. i literally just read a tumblr post from a deaf person that was like "don't visually set sign language apart from spoken languages" so i'm stopping that immediately. i went back and fixed it in previous chapters too. not really a huge deal but i figured since i'm changing shit i already published it's probably worth mentioning
> 
> also clarifying just in case, cerin primarily uses they/them/theirs pronouns, but he/him/his is also acceptable if one is physically incapable of using the singular they for whatever reason (and i mean literally incapable not "i don't want to/don't think that exists" or what the fuck ever). beldam's refusal to use their preferred pronouns is not to be emulated, obviously, but i can't bring myself to write her as continually intentionally using pronouns for them that they do not identify with at all. this middle ground kind of thing does not exist in every given situation so if someone gives you their pronouns just stick to whatever they tell you, don't assume something else will be okay.  
> lecture over enjoy

Beldam, however grudgingly, had to admit that the kid was a decent roommate when he was in his right mind. He didn’t do anything but mope in his corner. Beldam could almost forget that she was sharing her home, or what remained of it, with this anklebiter.

Almost being the key word. As much as she wanted to pretend she was alone, the presence of another person was impossible to ignore, a constant pressure in her mind. And even if he weren’t there, she’d felt like she was being watched anyway—this paranoia had been bugging her ever since the onset of the disease, and nothing could relieve it, so she ignored it. She considered getting up and roaming around, but knowing her luck, she’d inevitably run into another stupid Twilighter who would proceed to cause another commotion, and everyone would blame her. The kid would surely tattle, anyway, and the last thing she needed was for her sisters to be on her case.

She scowled to herself at the thought of her siblings. She couldn’t think about them, not now, not ever. So she squeezed her eyes shut, running her gloved fingers along the skin of her arm where the disease had taken over. Marilyn had informed her that the illness itself wasn’t likely to kill her after all, but it certainly felt like it would. It messed enough with her mind that she found it difficult to imagine it _wouldn’t_ have some hand in her inevitable death.

These pessimistic thoughts began their usual swarm in her mind, but just as she was about to lean back and ride it out yet again, there was a noise from the corner opposite her. A string of them, rising and falling in pitch. What the _hell_ was this racket?

It was only after she recognized a rhythm that she understood. The kid was humming to himself. Had he forgotten that making noise like that had led her to him in the first place? Probably. It hadn’t been more than a few days ago, but the two of them had spent unchanging day and night in these woods. It was becoming increasingly difficult for Beldam herself to piece together an accurate timeline, the kid had no hope of doing it.

She was half tempted to pelt him with ice, see if it would shut him up, but even as the air froze on her fingertips she found herself rethinking her plan. There was no guarantee that she’d gain the peace and quiet she craved—it would just piss him off, and that would compel him to further be annoying. So with some reluctance she dissipated the gathering magic, imagining its dispersal from her fingers chilling everything to the core, even though she knew her powers had a negligible effect on the environment.

Whatever. She could deal with this. The kid had a good grasp of the melody he was humming, not that she recognized it, and the more she listened the less obnoxious it became. She settled back with a sigh, laying her affected arm beside her and placing her other hand on her chest. As long as he didn’t start singing, she’d be fine.

On cue, he opened his mouth. He was still quiet, enough that she couldn’t catch any definitive words, but she still pinched the bridge of her nose. She’d never been able to bring herself to believe in a higher power, not after the life she’d lived, but at times like this she questioned her lack of faith. _Someone_ clearly took some sick joy in screwing with her.

But even as the tiny icicles began to form on her glove, she reconsidered. She was loath to admit it, but he had a good voice. That wasn’t a surprise, all Shadow Sirens did, herself included. But the idea of singing hadn’t even crossed her mind in centuries. It was a waste of breath, she used to tell Vivian, long ago. Doing _anything_ else would be a better use of your time and energy than purposefully making so much damned noise. But she admitted there was more to it than that. There was something so deeply personal about the act itself, something almost intimate. Such raw emotionality was nothing but weakness, and Beldam would sooner die than display it so freely. But the kid didn’t seem to care…no one had ever taught him not to. Vivian was more or less responsible for raising him, and she had clearly never shot him down.  

The darkness beckoned. Her grasp on herself slipped with every moment she imagined her sisters, so she latched onto the kid’s song. She clung to it, riding with it through the melody’s ups and downs, letting it flow through her and letting everything else drop away, into the void. Then his voice died away, the words fading into the silence, which then gave way to the sounds of the forest she had long learned to ignore. She felt rattled, like she’d just lost something of immense importance, yet this sense of suffering came coupled with…relief.

“You have a good set of pipes.”

She didn’t really intend to speak her thought out loud, but then nothing ever went the way she intended it to. She saw the shadows in his corner twitch—he’d jumped, probably, he’d forgotten she was there. She watched him slowly turn toward her with an incredulousness that almost made her want to smile.

“You know, the proper response to a compliment is usually ‘thank you.’”

His hesitation was clear even if she could barely see him. She felt tempted to be irritated that he was rejecting her olive branch in this way, but she couldn’t seem to muster any true indignation. Finally, he shifted in his corner, and she could now pick out his outline, and the grisly gash in his chest. “You mean it?”

“When have I ever said anything I didn’t mean?”

A dumbfounded silence followed her question. She could just tell he was sizing her up, trying to read her. Again she tried to bring herself to be offended—the one time she was speaking to him in good faith, and he treated her with this blatant suspicion? But there was still no anger, just the achiness of a loss that had never really happened. She needed to shut it down as quickly as possible.

“Thanks, I guess.” His tone was flat, a far cry from his singing. “I thought it would take more to impress you.”

“Oh, I’m not impressed,” she said, leaning back against the wall. Now she felt more in control, and much more like her old self. Now she could relinquish information on her terms. “You’re not special. All Shadow Sirens have good voices.”

“We do?” This was spoken with unquestionable interest, and she smiled to herself. He couldn’t have kept himself detached for long.

“We’re called sirens for a reason. It’s an innate talent of ours.”

“Even you?”

“What do you mean ‘even?’” She crossed her arms. “I’m a Shadow Siren, am I not?”

“Sure. I just never thought you’d be interested in music, like, at all. What about Marilyn?”

Beldam opened her mouth and closed it again, never really having considered that herself. “Well. In theory, yes? She should still have the ability regardless, but I doubt you could ever convince her to…”

“I know Vivian’s good at it,” the kid continued, oblivious to Beldam involuntarily tensing at the mention of her youngest sister. Of course Vivian had disregarded Beldam’s teachings, her efforts to keep her safe. “I didn’t know it was explicitly a species thing.”

“I’m not surprised. Vivian’s done her best to keep you sheltered. Ignorant. You’re lucky you know anything about us.” Her bitterness flared, but she told herself that the reason she said this was to test the kid’s limits. How far could she push him before he snapped? He was so attached to Vivian for whatever reason, she was sure slighting her even a little bit would make him lash out.

To her disappointment, he let the insult slide. His eyes narrowed, though. “How do I know you’re not jerking me around?”

“What?” She sat up straighter, feeling better now that it was her turn to fix him with an incredulous glare. “You must be joking. What do I stand to gain from lying to you over something stupid like this?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” His gloves moved through the darkness, he’d crossed his arms. “Prove it.”

“Now I know you’ve lost your mind.” She shook her head. “I’d sooner disembowel myself.”

“I’m not opposed to that, either.”

“Who taught you to be such a smartass?” She would give anything to be furious, but even to herself she only sounded bemused. She was glad the shadows covered most of her face, because she was afraid she was about to smile. Genuinely.

“Marilyn,” he said without hesitation. Beldam was too slow to swallow her laughter before it broke free.

“Should’ve known. She runs her mouth quite a lot, it would have gotten us in trouble many times if anyone besides us understood her…” She trailed off. The memories she’d invoked were painful. They hadn’t always been.

The kid changed the subject, to her grudging relief. “How would you even know that singing is a Shadow Siren thing? There’s fewer than ten of us alive. It’s too small a sample size.”

“Don’t you spew statistics at me,” she grunted. “Just because _you_ weren’t around when there were more of us doesn’t mean there never was. We knew plenty of sirens, centuries ago. And then they all were slaughtered.”

That shut him up. It honestly hadn’t been her intention this time, she hadn’t been thinking far enough ahead to consider the consequences of her words. But she felt no guilt, no obligation to keep the conversation going. She settled against the wall again as he slinked back into his corner. Like nothing had ever happened.

“Good talk,” she muttered under her breath, sure he wouldn’t hear.

He didn’t reply, but she was only rewarded with a few minutes of silence before he began singing again—still quietly, but now loud enough for her to understand the words.

_“I heard there was a secret chord_

_That David played and it pleased the Lord_

_But you don’t really care for music, do you?”_

He stopped there, even though there must have been more to the verse, and she knew it was an accusation. She bristled, and the anger she’d been so desperately searching for returned in a flash. He was going out of his way to needle her, how _dare_ he, she ought to teach him a lesson—

He’d lost the words but kept humming the same tune, and in a similar way her rage dissolved, leaving her with nothing but the melody in her ears. And again she cemented herself to it, for fear that if she didn’t she’d drown.

The kid didn’t bother finishing the song, she didn’t think, his voice just eventually flatlined into silence. She was cold. She waited until the kid had turned his back on her to wrap her good arm around herself and duck her head low. Her traitorous mind offered up images of things she’d rather forget and resisted all her attempts to blank it. Out of spite, she imagined, for what she had put it through. Now the quiet she had craved was strangling, and she buried her face in the crook of her arm.

It surprised her how little she regretted their conversation.

Anything to stave off the inevitable.

-

Marilyn came a few times a day, though her visits were brief and mostly silent. She dropped off food and supplies, and presumably made sure the afflicted sirens hadn’t killed each other or anyone else. Beldam almost missed when the kid wasn’t here to eavesdrop on any conversation she could have had with her sister. She knew he pretended not to hear things even though he did, and it was impossible for Beldam to sign anything with the cumbersome, pained movements of her corrupted arm.

All food had the same bland taste and rubbery texture, and she hardly had an appetite anyway, but she forced down the various mushroom dishes for Marilyn’s sake more than her own. This time, in addition to the usual leftovers, Marilyn dropped a thick blanket on the floor in front of her. Beldam stared at it for a moment, then glanced back up. “What the hell is this?”

“It’s going to be winter, idiot.”

“Watch your mouth,” Beldam snapped. Marilyn rolled her eyes and moved on, passing the rest onto the kid on the other side of the house. Beldam plucked at the blanket—it was old, and covered in patches, and fraying a little at the edges. As if she’d use this. Even if she weren’t an ice siren, and thus very used to the cold, she’d survived far worse than a little chill like this. She was half tempted to make Marilyn take the blanket back but knew the ensuing argument would only waste her time.

When she looked back up, the kid had a blanket of his own, wrapping himself in it so it engulfed him entirely. Beldam resisted the urge to sneer. She watched as he and Marilyn exchanged a few words, though she couldn’t tell exactly what either of them were saying through the gloom and instead told herself that she didn’t care. Then Marilyn vanished into the shadows, not to return for at least a few hours.

She had only a moment’s rest before the kid said, “Hey, Beldam.”

“You’re on thin ice,” she growled, cracking open an eye.

“Was that a pun?” He didn’t even pretend not to sound amused and she hated him for it.

“What do you want from me?”

“Information.” Immobilized as he was in his childish blanket nest, he still managed to lean forward with an expectant glimmer in his eyes. “I’m proposing an exchange of intel.”

“What could you possibly know that I don’t already?” Beldam scoffed, closing her eye. This kid may think they were equals, but she knew he had nothing to offer her.

“Why you lost. How the Cerin you knew came back. Why she and I are both still here.”

As loath as she was to admit it, that was something she’d been wondering since the Shadow Queen’s second, and probably final, failed resurrection. Beldam’s plan had hit a few snags along the way, but it had still been salvageable up until the Queen had revived her oldest servant. Then said servant had singlehandedly wrecked everything. Beldam had barely been able to escape her wrath alive…and while she was off licking her wounds, trying to pull herself together, it ended. Her victory had been yanked out of her grasp yet again. She didn’t pretend to know how all of this, _any_ of this, had happened. What did it matter?

She said as much. “You make a good effort, but none of that will do me any good now. Why should I give a damn?”

The kid shrugged. “I thought it would be better than sitting in silence. What I want to know from you isn’t going to do me any favors, either. I’m just curious.”

“About what?”

“The past. What it was like, to live a thousand years among people who were once your enemies. Vivian and Marilyn won’t talk about it, and Lillian and Cerin were isolated on Keelhaul the entire time.” He shifted a little where he sat, as if suddenly uncomfortable. “I feel like I’m missing some huge chunk of the picture that nobody else is, ‘cause they all lived it. And I figured you, of all people, would be the least likely to sugarcoat it.”

His earnestness caught Beldam a little off-guard. She still didn’t care at all about his plight, of course, but there had to be some way she could twist this to her advantage. “You do realize you’re making a deal with the devil?”

“If nothing else, it’ll pass the time, right?”

“I suppose.” Beldam could hardly believe she was agreeing to this, she knew it was a better idea to tell him to shove off, but the alternative was being alone with her thoughts and the pervasive feeling of being watched. “You first.”

“Not a chance.”

She clicked her tongue. It was kind of ridiculous that she was being held to her end of such a low-reward deal, but at least the kid had an ounce of common sense. “Fine. I’ll humor you.”

“What _is_ it with you and Vivian?”

Beldam turned to face him head-on, willing her glare to pierce him to the bone. “That was a poor question to ask first off.”

“I don’t care. What did she do to you? You never treated Marilyn like that.”

Beldam rolled her eyes, slowly and deliberately so he was sure to see it. “Marilyn wasn’t the weakest link of the three of us. Marilyn knew how to shut up and do as she was told without asking inane questions.”

“Marilyn couldn’t even question you until you both learned to communicate the same way. Which I don’t think happened overnight.”

“Remember how I said you’re on thin ice? It’s cracking.” Beldam raised her good hand and rubbed her fingers against her palm. Half-formed snow fluttered down to the ground, glittering in the moonlight.

“Are you threatening me?” The shadows in his corner rippled.

“It’s more of a warning.” Beldam dropped her hand, evaporating her magic. The kid may think otherwise, but her threats were empty. She was so weakened by this disease, she couldn’t imagine winning a fight like this.

Luckily, when she sheathed her metaphorical sword, so did he. The shadows stilled, though a pair of purple eyes still locked on her, making something like anxiety flit through her chest before she squashed it.

“I have a question for you,” she said. “Are you or are you not the real Cerin?”

“I am just as real as she is,” the kid said, a little snappishly. “But I’m not her.”

“You have her name, her powers, her memories.”

“Not exactly.” The kid sat back a little, extracting one of his hands from the blanket to scratch his head. “I _had_ some of her memories—that’s why we have the same name, I remembered it being hers and it stuck. But I lost them when I got wiped.”

“You what?”

“Oh, that’s right, you wouldn’t have known about that.” Now the kid almost looked bashful. “I…something happened when we faced the Shadow Queen. I’m pretty sure I died. But I came back, eventually. We think it was because of the Crystal Stars and the princess’s power.”

“The princess?”

“Peach,” he clarified. “Oh, yeah, she and Mario showed up pretty much at the last possible second. They said they came as soon as they saw the sky go dark wherever it is that they live.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Beldam muttered, bringing her good hand up to her face. “The two of them again…” She chuckled humorlessly. “I never stood a chance after all. Even if she hadn’t screwed me over…”

Wisely, the kid chose not to comment. Beldam paid him little attention as she rubbed her temple. As long as those two humans were able to intervene, any plot she could ever conceive may as well have been stillborn. It was a hollow kind of comfort.

She sighed, which the kid took as a sign to keep going. “Yeah, so, here I am. I don’t share much else with her besides name and powers, and those are just as much mine as they are hers, now. I think. Is that enough to convince you that we’re not the same person?”

“I know you’re not the same person,” Beldam snorted. “I used to think you were her, reborn into the body of a child. But now I see that you’re…some kind of inferior clone.”

She’d expected him to have some snappy remark, but he was silent. It took her a moment to recognize it, but it was undoubtedly the same stunned, wounded silence that followed whenever Beldam had pushed Vivian too far, said something too cutting. She pursed her lips a little—it had been that easy to get the kid to crack? She’d thought he at least had thicker skin than her youngest sister.

She watched him recover, watched his eyes go from wide in shock to slitted and malicious. She leaned back against the wall nonchalantly, ignoring the movement of the shadows in the corner. “Oh, get over yourself. You’re not the only one who came out wrong, so to speak.”

“What? What are you talking about?” the kid asked, the threat of a growl still in his voice. But Beldam deliberately turned her back on him, facing the wall and lowering herself onto the cold ground. She could practically feel his anger and smirked to herself. And yet…it all felt empty. The satisfaction she’d expected from pissing him off was conspicuously absent. They were sworn enemies, why couldn’t she derive any enjoyment from his pain?

She laid there, unmoving, listening to him storm around in his corner. It felt like hours before she heard him flop down himself, and still she waited, hoping he’d fallen asleep. Then, as slowly as she could manage, she rolled over to take the blanket she had long discarded by one of its unraveling edges. She swaddled herself in it and hid her face. As if maybe the kid wouldn’t think it was her if he happened to glance over.

She knew she could only ignore the truth for so long, but today was not the day she could bring herself to face it. Tomorrow probably wouldn't be, either. She was banking on dying first, before she broke. She would not break. 

It was getting harder and harder to believe herself.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> first a quick disclaimer that the views expressed by the characters do not necessarily reflect those of the author. 
> 
> anyway this is my favorite chapter, the dialogue was a blast to write and i love explaining the surrounding lore, as is probably obvious

The transition from summer to fall in Twilight Town always brought rain. It wasn’t quite a torrential downpour, the clouds that brought it neither large nor dark enough to completely blot out the moon, but it was more than enough to annoy Beldam as she hid under the overhang. The missing portion of the roof made the rest of it slope down at a steep angle, and she watched the rainwater roll down it and splatter the ground in front of her like a waterfall. When the wind blew just right, it would send freezing droplets from this cascade straight into her face. But to move would be admitting defeat, and she was too proud (or stubborn, or _stupid_ ) to ever lose to a little rain. So she sat, the blanket she’d scoffed at wrapped permanently around her shoulders, and scowled into the sheet of falling water.

Normally the advent of this obnoxious rainy season would make her wait it out elsewhere. Back in the day, Rogueport tended to be her preferred haunt during this time. There were enough shady people inhabiting the harbor town that no one paid any attention to one more, plus there were plenty of dark alleys to hide in when the weak sunlight got too much for her to bear. If she were able to travel now, she’d leave behind this soggy dump in a heartbeat. But it was becoming more and more obvious that she physically couldn’t move through the shadows anymore—she’d tried, quietly of course, to slip outside these run-down walls. But the darkness itself rejected her afflicted arm. It had begun a while ago, when the symptoms first began to creep up from her fingertips, and she felt like things were clawing at her when she dissolved herself into the shadows. It was distracting, disturbing even, but she’d chosen to ignore it. That wasn’t a possibility anymore.

The last time she’d veiled herself, it felt as if someone had taken a red-hot knife and carved where the diseased whiteness met her unaffected skin. The mere memory of the pain made her bite into her lip to keep from crying out. The white had now encroached her shoulder and had started creeping up her neck. She’d noticed that her affected skin turned black before it turned white, and she was sure by now the black split her face down the middle. She didn’t know what would happen should the white touch her eyes, but given the gnarled claws of her right hand, she didn’t have very high hopes.

“You know, it’s drier over here.”

She rolled her eyes so far into the back of her head that it almost hurt. “I miss when you hated me enough that you wouldn’t speak to me,” she replied.

“Oh, I still hate you. That’s why I’m bugging you,” the kid said, almost nonchalantly.

Beldam clicked her tongue against her teeth. “It’s a damned miracle you’ve survived this long.” She grimaced as the wind showered her with rainwater and ducked her head, burying her face into the blanket until it passed.

“You’re one to talk. You’re sitting over there getting rained on to spite…who, exactly?”

“I don’t have to justify myself to you!”

The kid made a weird noise in his throat. It took Beldam a moment to realize it was restrained laughter. She seethed.

“I’m just saying, there’s more cover here. I’m not going to judge you if you want to get out of the rain like a normal person.”

She didn’t believe that for a second. This was clearly a power play—if she deigned to do what he suggested, she might as well hand him what was left of her dignity on a silver platter. Never.

 _...Stars, what am I doing?_ Was she really sitting out here in the rain like a _moron_ because she felt like she had something to prove to this stupid child? She gathered up the ragged blanket in her arms and backed away from the overhang, into the other covered corner where she’d left all her stuff that had survived the roof caving in. Now she had two walls behind her, and while the roof above still had a couple leaky spots, it was much better than having rain blown into her face. She turned with a glower across the room, expecting the kid to be watching her with the smuggest and most punchable look on his face.

But he wasn’t even looking at her. His gaze was turned out into the open area of the house. His arms were crossed, his gloved fingers tapping out a rhythm on his opposite arm. He wasn’t paying attention to her at all, he was wrapped up in song again. She felt relieved…and almost hurt.

The two of them sat and watched the rain dribble off the roof, for long enough that Beldam caught herself dozing. She almost wished the kid would start singing again, the noise would at least keep her alert. But he stayed silent.

Until, finally, he turned toward her with his eyebrows knitted together. “What did you mean when you said I’m not the only one who came out wrong?”

Beldam drew in a long breath and exhaled through her teeth. She dragged the silence out, waiting for him to prompt her again, but he didn’t.

She didn’t have to answer him. She had no obligation to tell him anything at all, let alone be honest. Yet the words had formed on her tongue and left her lips before she even knew what she was doing. “How familiar are you with how the Shadow Queen made her Sirens?”

“Not very. She made me by mistake, remember?”

Beldam smiled, but even to herself it was bitter, almost painful. “You and I aren’t so different, kid. We may as well be mistakes, too.”

“We?”

“My sisters, you dunce. Do try and keep up.” She settled herself further against the wall with a half-sigh, half-groan. “The Queen had been desperately clinging to her empire for over a decade when she made us, the seventh generation. She churned out hundreds of Shadow Sirens over the years, on top of creating the more disposable members of her army. It was bound to take its toll on her. She got…sloppy, shall we say. More prone to blunders in the process. Exhibit A: Marilyn.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” The kid frowned.

“I’m sure it’ll come to you if you think about it long enough.”

“You’re talking about how she’s deaf, aren’t you.” Whatever prior affability had been in the kid’s tone was now gone. She supposed it didn’t surprise her that he was so protective of her other younger sister, too.

“Put your hackles down, kid. I’m only saying that a thousand years ago, she would have been nothing more than a liability. The Queen made us to be her military. What use is a soldier who can’t hear, who can’t speak? Who knows what the Queen would have done with her? Luckily, that whole thing came crashing down before any of us realized what was happening with her…we just went a while thinking she was incomprehensibly stupid. Obviously she’s not.”

She doubted her explanation completely placated the kid, but he dropped the subject anyway. “What about you, then?”

“Oh, I see. You’re so convinced Vivian is _perfect,_ aren’t you? She could _never_ be a reject like us.” She sneered, ignoring the twisting of her gut.

“I never said that. I just know exactly what you’re going to say about her, and I don’t want to hear it.” He cleared his throat, and when he next spoke his voice was suddenly much more adenoidal. “ _She’s such a coward, and a ditz, and she can’t do anything right, and…_ and…” He dropped the act, which was just as well, as Beldam was moments away from shanking him with an icicle. “Screw it, let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room. She’s trans. You don’t like that.”

“I don’t care what she thinks she is—“

“There is no ‘thinks she is,’ Beldam. She _is._ End of story.” His eyes blazed in the darkness. Beldam’s heart leaped into her throat. The last time she’d seen such hostility in those purple eyes, she’d nearly died.

“Fine,” she ground out after taking a moment to compose herself. “Lecturing me on how to treat my own sister—this isn’t a new development, you self-assured brat! I’ve been using the name _she_ chose for over nine hundred goddamn years! I don’t even remember the name the Queen gave her. Besides, I know full well that that’s her breaking point.”

She crossed her arms, trying not to grimace at the phantom pain that traveled through her at the revival of these memories. “She took it for a while, but…one time I said something insensitive, I don’t even remember what it was. And she _snapped._ She cracked my ribs. Marilyn had to physically restrain her. And then she ran away…we couldn’t find her for weeks, and not for lack of trying.” She looked up to meet the kid’s eyes with a glare of her own. “I had burn scars for centuries from that ordeal. Needless to say, I heeded her warning. There are better things to berate her for than her gender, anyway.”

The kid was quiet for quite some time. Beldam took the opportunity to further calm herself, forming snowflakes on the fingers of her good hand and watching them blow away in the wind.

“You did, though,” the kid said eventually. “I remember you did, inside the Palace, before you took the Stars down to the Queen’s tomb. You called her a deceiver, or something.”

“Uh huh.” Beldam turned somewhat to face him, giving him a withering glare. “Tell me, oh knowledgeable one, what did I do immediately after saying that? Maybe I did something like, I don’t know, raise the dead?” She rolled her eyes. “I was not in my right mind. Drunk on power, as they say. If I hadn’t been, then…” Her volume lowered. She didn’t mean for it to. “Maybe none of this would have ever happened.”

Again the kid granted her a reprieve of blissful silence, punctuated by the tapping of rain on the roof above them. Though anything short of a millennium wasn’t long enough for her. She screwed her eyes shut as he said, “You still haven’t explained how the Queen made you wrong.”

The temptation to refuse to answer struck her again, though, for once, she didn’t seriously entertain it. Maybe it was just the disease toying with her mental faculties again, but…talking made her feel better, somehow. Like her arm and fingers were less stiff. She was clearly losing her mind. Yet…even if the ease of pain was just a temporary illusion, she longed to feel better.

And, maybe, just maybe, the kid deserved the truth.

“Look at me.” She opened her eyes. The kid had turned away at her silence but now snapped to attention, as if following a military command. She fixed him, staring so intently at him that he squirmed.

“I’d existed for all of five minutes when the Queen named me ‘old crone.’ She _knew_ she fucked up the second I crawled out of the shadows. That’s why my sisters are better off, she must have made an effort to not have another _me_ happen.” Her tone dripped bitterness and she hated it. “I’m probably the shortest siren on record. I have the muscle mass of a Ruff Puff and the constitution of a scrap of paper. My only saving grace—the one reason I wasn’t culled on sight, probably--is that my magic abilities are unparalleled. But at what cost?” She jabbed a finger at her defunct arm, which was starting to ache again.

“I was supposed to just be a normal ice siren. I should never have been able to do this to myself. If all Shadow Sirens were capable of using black magic—it would have been catastrophic. The species would have eaten itself alive, and the Queen knew this. So she restricted it to the first, the ultimate, her most trusted.” Now she pointed at Cerin, in a way that even to herself seemed accusatory. “But she messed me up bad enough that I got it too, somehow. And look at all the good it’s done me!” She stood up, her temper flaring, the blanket falling from around her shoulders to pool at her tail.

“The other sirens distrusted me on sight, something about me made them uncomfortable no matter what I did or didn’t do. And both my sisters outclass me, they always have. Marilyn is stronger than I could ever dream of being, and probably smarter too. Vivian—stars alive, Vivian is as—as perfect as one of us defects will ever get! If I don’t have them, I…I have nothing.” Her voice quaked, and though she fought against its trembling with all her strength, it didn’t seem to matter. “They would have been just fine without me, my seniority as the eldest be damned. If anything, I was the one slowing them down, holding them back. They couldn’t know that. I couldn’t let them. So I…” She swallowed. “Marilyn was easier to convince. For hundreds of years, we were the only ones who could understand her. She relied on us…relied on me. But Vivian…what could I possibly offer her? There was no reason she needed to stay with me.”

She paused to collect herself, breathing in the cool twilight air. The kid’s voice broke the silence. “So you created one.”

“One? Hundreds! Every damned day I had a new reason she couldn’t possibly survive on her own! She was too stupid, too forgetful, too naive, she was so fortunate to have her sisters looking out for her ‘cause without us she’d be long dead! And she believed every word. I learned where her limits were, and not to test them. It was a delicate balance…one I went to painstaking measures not to upset.”

The corner’s shadows were shuddering. “You knew you were manipulating her the whole time,” the kid growled. Beldam could hear his bared teeth in his voice.

“Of course I did,” she replied, watching the darkness writhe and silently daring it to come after her.

“You emotionally abused your own sisters for a thousand years!” The more the shadows twitched, the more they seemed to be condensing into a recognizable shape, one with five fingers. Beldam’s eyes widened and she fought the urge to take a step back. She hadn’t anticipated the kid getting so angry he’d regain even momentary control over his magic.

“All this time I thought you were just—oblivious,” he continued, his eyes flashing. “Too self-absorbed to realize how your actions hurt other people. That was bad enough. But you _knew!_ And you did _nothing!”_

“You think I don’t know that?” The words jumped to her lips despite her growing trepidation. “I don’t need you to tell me how much of a disgusting, despicable person I am. I do have a conscience, it just…was easy to tune out, especially in the face of the plan I spent most of my life setting into motion. Everything I put Marilyn and Vivian through was a means to an end that would make up for it all!”

She strode toward the corner, her arms spread, her eyes locked onto the tense silhouette of the younger siren. “Who are you to wave your finger at me? You said it yourself, you don’t have a damn clue what any of us lived through! You’ve never watched a fellow siren die protecting you from the blades of bloodthirsty maniacs! A thousand years ago, your so-called friends would have slit your throat and bragged about it!”

Her bad arm throbbed and her good one was dribbling slushy chunks of half-formed ice. She dropped both to her sides, trying not to growl in pain. “But times have changed since then, haven’t they? The Shadow Queen and the Shadow Sirens were both lost to time. Reduced to mere legends and hearsay. We deserve better than that. So I began to think…no one would have ever suspected her return. She would encounter no resistance as she took back the world she once conquered—she could even resurrect all the sirens that were lost! It would usher in a new age for us, the shunned and the broken, chased away from society because of our _devil magic_. Not even you, in the short time you’ve been around, can deny the prejudice you’ve faced simply because others find you creepy.” She leered at him and the shadows in his corner fluttered. “I was the only one who could pull off a plan of this magnitude. And when I did…no longer would I be the runt, the defect. I’d be the one who saved us all—I’d be a hero!”

The rain striking the roof was the only thing keeping the following silence from being deafening. She could just tell that the kid was dying to say something, but no words came, so she filled in the quiet herself. “If I could just accomplish that goal, it would all be worth it. It was our only chance at living the lives we should have led. And it almost worked…until _he_ appeared.” She couldn’t keep the venom out of her voice, and didn’t make much of an effort to. “This powerless, ordinary human showed up with his troupe of equally mediocre allies, and they laid waste to my life’s work! Setback after setback, failsafes failing left and right—and the worst part? My sister abandoned me in favor of _him._ He turned her against me, against us, against our entire species!”

“He didn’t do anything,” the kid interrupted. “You did. You were the one who drove her away, toward someone else who actually treated her the way she deserved to be. And I bet you know that, too.”

She did. But having it spoken out loud, aimed at her like a weapon, stung more than she wanted to admit. Her blood boiled and she ground her teeth, but no defense came to her.

“So why the black magic?” he asked after a few minutes of contemplative silence. “That’s the whole reason we’re here now. And no one knew you could use it until you did.”

“You, of all people, should understand that I didn’t have much choice in the matter.” She stared at him until he shifted uncomfortably. “It was a decision born of desperation. After the Queen was defeated, Marilyn, too, abandoned me. She saw how much better off Vivian was…and she was welcomed with open arms. Just like that, I was left with nothing. So I did what anyone would do upon realizing how horribly they’ve lost—I doubled down. If I could make myself stronger, unstoppable even, I would win. I’d get my family back.”

She extended her bad hand, her fingers shaking with the effort, and gave it a baleful look. “You know firsthand how intoxicating it is. And I invited it with no hesitation, no thought toward what it would do to me. It didn’t matter—I was going to succeed or die trying. And here I am, dying.”

The low rumble of distant thunder made her come back to herself, and suddenly standing was exhausting. She slinked away, back into the corner sheltered by the overhang, groping for the blanket and wrapping it around her shoulders. She leaned her head back against the wall and squeezed her eyes shut. Why had she told him all of that? She didn’t even want to think about it.

The kid spoke at a volume that sounded more like he was talking to himself, but the rain seemed to quiet down just enough for her to hear him. “You’re more like the Queen than any of us.”

Beldam’s eyes snapped open. “What are you talking about?”

He left her hanging for a moment. She didn’t even care if he was doing it on purpose. “Cerin—the other one—told me once that that’s exactly what happened to the Queen. The black magic consumed her so thoroughly…when the heroes came, there wasn’t even enough left of her that she could die. She’s stuck, in this gray area between life and death, waiting for the seal on the door to weaken. To get another chance that she’ll hopefully blow like the rest.” He paused to give a weak, closed-mouth cough. Then, “I’m sure she’d be proud of you.”

The remark cut her. She didn’t know why. Her powers reacted first, her bad arm burning as icicles extended from the other. “Who the hell do you think you are?!” she spat. “As if I did anything for her approval—for anyone’s!”

“I thought we sirens were supposed to be good liars,” the kid deadpanned, shaking his head. “You said you wanted to be a hero. You wanted to be recognized as someone powerful, someone important. For all the terrible, inexcusable things you did…I don’t think I can fault you for that itself.”

“Oh, thank you for deigning to understand me,” Beldam snapped, again reacting without thinking. “You can take your apologism, or pity, or whatever, and shove it up—” She halted, the implication finally clicking. Her ice dissolved. “You’d only understand if you knew what it was like.”

“You don’t remember when you called me an inferior clone?” the kid replied. Whether he meant to or not, his tone hardened a little. “You knew how to hit me where it hurt. Takes one to know one.”

Beldam said nothing, instead watching the kid shuffle a little bit where he sat. It looked like he was pulling on his gloves. “You were right, you know. We’re not so different. You’re defective, and I’m an accident, and the Queen rejected us both.”

“What’s your point?”

“I don’t know. I’m just…” He yanked at his gloves again. “I do know what it’s like to feel alone. Unnecessary. You may be a defect in the eyes of the Queen, but at least you’re unique. Not just a worse version of someone else. Everything I do, she does better…” He sighed, heavy enough to resemble the weight he was carrying. “I never feel like I’ve earned my right to exist here, when I know I wasn’t really supposed to ever be born, or made, or whatever. It’s…hard to justify the space I take up sometimes.”

Beldam had to admit she hadn’t expected such candidness from him. Only an idiot would tell an untrustworthy person all their deepest-rooted insecurities, she thought with a scoff. He was lucky she had no desire to turn them against him.

 _Just like with Vivian,_ something whispered in the back of her mind. She stiffened, clenching her teeth and her fists so hard it hurt.

“Listen to yourself,” she sniffed, the snide remark from her renegade thoughts making her burn with frustration. “Over there sniveling ‘cause the world so _graciously_ allows you to exist. You want to know what things would be like if it weren’t for you? I’d have won.” She remembered the humans, and amended, “Maybe. My point being, you don’t owe anyone anything. Neither of us chose this, chose to be the way we are. Who would want the life of a self-hating mistake like you, or a…a broken mockery of everything a Shadow Siren is supposed to be, like…”

She was suddenly unable to finish her sentence. The kid mulled over her words for a while as she rested her eyes, listening to the diminished tapping of the thinning rain on the roof.

“I mean, I guess,” the young siren said at length, the shrug evident in their tone. “But…I don’t think that’s an excuse to be bad to people. No one else really asked to be here, either…I hate the idea of causing senseless pain when there’s already so much of it. And I want to repay the kindness I’ve been shown, too. It’s because of Vivian, and all her friends, that I’m here now. I have to prove to them that their efforts weren’t wasted on me.”

Beldam was expecting to have some acerbic remark, but she came up empty. The way they idolized her youngest sister…Beldam hadn’t concerned herself with why they did any of the weird things they did, least of all that, but this seemed to be yet more evidence toward something she’d considered before. Vivian’s natural compassion was something Beldam had always failed to grasp. But it hadn’t escaped her notice that Vivian seemed to consistently pick the winning side. Those people she’d allied with were strong, incredibly so. And even now, years after their first adventure, they still seemed to like each other. They even treated a young Shadow Siren as one of their own simply because Vivian wanted them to.

And who were Beldam’s friends? She could count them on one hand. The people she’d chosen to call her allies all had eventually turned on her…or she them. Her sisters, the only people on the planet she truly trusted, had left her in the end. And the Shadow Queen herself had given nothing in return for Beldam’s ceaseless loyalty. A thousand years of her life, utterly wasted.

“Damn the Queen!” she said, so loudly she surprised both herself and the kid, who jumped. “She would have never recognized me as the asset I am. I brought the world to its knees for her _twice_ and didn’t get so much as a thank you!”

“Uh…yeah.” The kid sounded like they were about to say something else, probably some snide comment about how it had taken her this long to realize, but they had the good sense to keep their mouth shut. Beldam couldn’t help but appreciate that.

“She can rot,” she grumbled, turning over so she faced the wall opposite the kid.

“That’s the spirit.” There was quiet shuffling as they, too shifted where they sat. Then, “Good night, Beldam.”

The impulse to respond blindsided her entirely, and she snapped her mouth shut before she did. She let the farewell fizzle out into the brisk evening air and waited what felt like centuries for sleep to take her. But in spite of her chronic insomnia, the thoughts that swarmed her were easier to block out than they had been. The pattering of rain was no longer an annoyance, but almost relaxing. And her arm…she was so used to it being wracked with pain that the absence of it was jarring. She didn’t quite know who she was without it.

“No. No more,” she hissed to herself, the wind carrying her words into the rain and scattering them. She knew exactly who she was without the pain, without the disease controlling her. And she was not going to give up what little ground she’d gained against it. _I’ll be damned if I go down without a fight._

She clung to that tiny flare of conviction with all her might as she finally dropped off.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welcome to shit gets real part two

The rain may have stopped, but to make up for the clear skies, Beldam found the premonition that had been haunting her especially strangling today. She thought she had trained herself to ignore it, but it was suddenly so heavy on her mind, smothering her thoughts, making her skin prickle so hard it nearly hurt. Even with her back pressed against the wall, she felt exposed. It was impossible to focus through this haze of paranoia…maybe it was yet another symptom of the madness. But in that case, she shouldn’t be the only one.

“Hey, kid,” she called across the room.

They’d been slouching but sat up at her voice—clearly not as on edge as she was. Damn. They didn’t look pleased at being summoned, but the frown they met her with wasn’t as malicious as it once had been. “I have a name.”

“The other one came first. I can’t say that name and not think of her.”

They rolled their eyes. “Use a nickname, then, almost everyone I know calls me something different. I’m sick of being ‘kid.’”

“Does ‘brat’ suit your fancy?”

“You call everyone that. Can I ask for something more unique?”

“Fine,” Beldam sniffed. “Rerun.”

“Oh, ouch.” They brought a hand up to their chest and grimaced in mock pain. Though for all she knew, their wound was acting up and it wasn’t as fake as she thought. “I thought you’d just call me ‘freckles’ or something.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers, Rerun. All I wanted to do was ask a simple question.”

“Then ask it.”

Beldam leaned back a little, trying to look as casual and unaffected as possible. “Have you felt like you’re being watched lately?”

They paused, their eyes darting from one side of the house to the other. “Uh…yeah, sometimes. I thought that was a part of this, though,” they said as they pointed to the white center of their chest.

“Maybe,” Beldam said over her pulse quickening. “It’s been fairly constant for me…until now, where it’s all I can think about.”

The kid dropped their gaze to the ground, pulling at the wrist of one of their gloves. “You know, now that you mention it, it kind of does feel like that. But how do you know it’s not just your mind playing tricks on you?”

“Right,” Beldam said, pretending like her throat wasn’t constricting around the words she tried to speak. “No one who wishes us harm should know that we’re out here. It’s ridiculous to even think that we’re being watched.”

The kid gave her a weird look, but she didn’t pay it much attention. Her hands were trembling, her good one safely hidden in her glove but the bad one’s clawed fingers twitching without her input. She turned away from the other siren, both to examine the house and so they wouldn’t see her face. Just as she expected, there was nothing out of the ordinary. Not a speck of dust was out of place, the walls illuminated by the moon behind them. She cursed herself and flexed her good hand, succeeding in stopping its quaking for just a moment. It was all in her head, she knew it was.

Then there was a flash of white light, sudden and bright enough to blind her. She jumped and her bad arm cramped with her movement. She rubbed at her eyes with her good arm, pulling it away only to have her jaw fall open. There was a stranger in her house.

They stood in front of her and Cerin, clad in spotless white robes with gold trimming. The robes swallowed their entire body except their feet, in pointed gold shoes, and their hands, wearing white gloves and clutching a gold staff with a pearlescent orb at one end. A hood covered their face from view, though a pair of yellow eyes peered out from the shadows the hood drew. On instinct, Beldam raised her good hand and did her best to sweep her hair into her own eyes.

“You sorry lot are what’s responsible for making my job that much harder?” The newcomer’s voice had a chimelike, almost musical quality to it. But the hostility with which they spoke was anything but pleasant, and Beldam bristled when they thumped the bottom end of their staff on the ground.

“Who the hell are you?” she spat, shedding her blanket and rising to her full height. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Cerin do the same.

“Me? I am a descendant of the Tribe of Ancients,” the stranger said, turning on Beldam and narrowing their eyes. “You would do to learn your place.”

“My place? I live here!” Ice was coalescing on the fingers of her good hand, and a thrill of excitement swept through her despite herself. It felt like it had been years since she had intentionally used her natural powers, and they were impatiently tugging at her. “This is _my_ home! You’re the one who needs to learn your place—get out!”

The intruder didn’t at all appear fazed, instead looking around the crumbling walls and giving a disdainful snort. “I suppose I shouldn’t even be surprised that you call this pathetic dump your home.”

Beldam snarled, but before she could launch any ice at the robe-clad stranger, the kid spoke and shattered her concentration. “Why are you here?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Now they turned to glare at the younger siren. “I am a white mage. My job is to ensure the balance between the opposing forces of white and black magic. The two of you _creatures_ are throwing it off.” The hand that wasn’t holding the staff pointed at Cerin’s chest. “That whiteness is the result of the white magic found in low concentrations throughout the natural world. It seeks to neutralize the overdose of black magic in your very being. And it would be able to if you weren’t fighting it every step of the way!” They whipped around to now fix Beldam, their hand tightening on their staff. “I’ve been waiting for it to take care of _you_ for over a year. But you keep resisting, and my patience wears thin. You leave me no choice.”

Beldam saw it coming as the staff swung in her direction, and she scrambled out of the way. Another flash of blinding light made her hiss and cover her eyes with her arm, but she ripped it away as soon as it was over, blinking away the spots that danced in her vision. The ground on which she’d stood a second before had been blackened, the blanket she’d dropped reduced to ash.

“What are you doing?!” Cerin yelled, the shadows writhing around them. The mage swiped the staff at them, and the very darkness exploded. The kid cried out, their voice nearly lost among the sizzling of whatever the light had struck.

“Leave them alone!” Beldam barked. The most she had been able to generate was a flurry of tiny ice shards, but since it was all she had, she flung them anyway. They bounced harmlessly off the mage’s cloak. They turned back to face her, their eyes mere slits in the darkness of their hood.

“I’m the one who was using the black magic!” Beldam shouted, spreading her arms out. “I caused all this, it’s me you want!”

“You are even more of a fool than you look if you think that is what this is about.” The mage cracked their staff across the open palm of their other hand. Beldam turned her head slightly, relieved to see the kid move in the corner, struggling to rise. They hadn’t been hit. Probably.

“I don’t care whose fault it is,” the mage continued snappishly. “Both of you are the problem. You will continue to disrupt the balance as long as you exist. Either stop fighting the progression of the white magic, or allow me to finish it.”

They lowered their staff, the orb pointed straight at Beldam’s chest. She grit her teeth but didn’t move, watching some substance move inside the orb like flickering flames, too bright to look at head-on.

The blinding flash that followed was accompanied by an earsplitting, earthshattering boom.

Her ears ringing, she cracked open her eyes to find that she was still in one piece. The mage that had stood before her now lay face down, their white robes singed, the staff rolling out of their grasp and across the ground. Beldam lifted her head, spying a purple shadow at the open end of the house, shaking her hands in the air as if her palms stung.

“Marilyn!” Beldam cried before she could stop herself, remembering half a second too late that calling out was useless. Regardless, Marilyn approached, carefully sidestepping the smoldering mage with a grimace.

Beldam made eye contact with her younger sister and mouthed, “Thank you,” as she put her fingertips to her chin before swinging her arm down at the elbow. That much signing she could accomplish with her one good hand. Marilyn nodded, almost absentmindedly, as she scrutinized the fallen mage. Cerin crept around her other side, reluctantly removing their hands from their ears. Marilyn glanced at them and they signed, “Are they dead?”

Marilyn chose not to answer and instead asked, “Who is this? What happened?” Cerin and Beldam exchanged a glance, the younger siren giving a helpless kind of shrug.

“A white mage,” Beldam said slowly, so Marilyn could read her lips. She threw in airquotes with her good hand for good measure. “Said something about…the balance of black versus white magic being upset. Because of us. Because of me.”

Marilyn looked nothing short of baffled. Cerin reached around her to grab the staff, swinging it upward to examine the orb.

Beldam flinched away. “Careful with that thing, Rerun!”

“I’ve never even heard of white magic until now,” they muttered, squinting at the orb. The dancing light in its center seemed to have died at their touch, and didn’t react even when they poked it with a finger.

“Really? I thought it was self-explanatory,” Beldam replied, crossing her arms with a wary eye on the pile of robes. “I wasn’t made knowing how to use black magic, you know. I did my research…a lot of it. A great many of the ancient texts I consulted mentioned white magic as well. Some seemed to regard black and white magic as polar opposites. Others essentially said they were one and the same.”

“That would have been nice to know earlier,” the kid remarked, striking the ground with the staff the same way the mage had and giving her a frown.

“You never asked.”

“Are you kidding me?!”

Marilyn raised her hand and cut the kid off. She signed, “How can two things be the same and opposite simultaneously?”

Beldam shrugged. “A translation error, perhaps. I had to decipher many of those old tomes myself. It was far from easy. Though then again…it’s odd that the same mistranslation would pop up multiple times, from multiple sources, is it not?”

Whatever the others’ thoughts were, she didn’t get to hear them, because the pile of robes twitched and moaned. All three froze. Then, with no hesitation, Marilyn reached out and yanked the staff out of Cerin’s hands. With a motion as fluid as if she’d rehearsed it, she swung the staff and smashed the orb against the ground. The noise like shattered glass was louder than Beldam anticipated, echoing inside her mind and rattling her to the core. Pieces skittered across the ground, sparkling like snow before the reflections themselves seemed to swallow them up, leaving no trace.

Marilyn was left holding the remains of the staff, which she snapped in half like a twig and tossed aside, probably just to prove she could.

Amidst more groaning and shuffling of robes, the mage staggered to their feet, one disembodied hand clutching their head. Beldam braced herself, seeing Cerin clench their fists and Marilyn step protectively in front of them both. The mage didn’t seem to notice; they snapped the fingers of their other hand, and in a flash of light, less potent than the others, their robes had cleansed themselves of soot and were just as immaculate as they had been.

The mage pulled their hand away from their face at last and stared up at Marilyn, who had crossed her arms and stood still as a statue. Then their eyes traveled down to their own hands, which were empty, and the ground, then back up to her.

_“What did you do to my staff?!”_

Unable to help herself, Beldam pointed at one of the halves Marilyn had discarded. “It’s over here. And here…and some over there…”

_“YOU IDIOTS!”_

The mage lunged. Marilyn met them midair with her fist and sent them sprawling across the ground. Beldam cracked a grin so wide it almost hurt. She advanced, stopping mere inches from the mage as they again got to their feet with a wheeze.

“A resilient one, aren’t you?” she said, throwing out her corrupted arm. It snagged the mage by the front of their robes, her fingers slicing into the fabric. She relished the widening of their eyes. “I’ve had just about enough of this. Either you’re going to explain what in the seven hells is happening to us, or I’ll have my dearest sister fry you to a crisp.”

“I will tell you nothing!” the mage spat. Their floating hands touched Beldam’s wrist but jerked away just as quickly, as if the corruption burned them. “As if I would negotiate with a bunch of brutes who do nothing but destroy as they please!”

“You were trying to kill us,” Cerin said, appearing suddenly just over Beldam’s other shoulder.

“Because I must,” the mage growled, tugging a little at their robes but stopping when they audibly ripped. “Neither of you monsters should be alive. And that beast you call a sister?” Their eyes traveled from Beldam’s face to somewhere above her, where Marilyn must be looming. “She appears untainted, so I have no official orders to eliminate her…but collateral damage is always a possibility.”

“You talk a lot for someone who’s useless without your little stick,” Beldam said with another deranged grin, shaking the mage until their head rolled.

“Who’s giving you orders?” Now Cerin leaned in, one of their hands covering their chest as if it were paining them.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Cerin’s face darkened. They turned to Beldam with an expression like they’d eaten something rancid. “I am in no state to play good cop, bad cop.” To punctuate this, the shadow they cast spasmed.

“Whatever happened to taking the high road?” Beldam flashed her teeth at them, then back at the mage, who’d finally gone limp in her grasp. “That makes three of us who want to dash your head across the stones. I would suggest you start talking.”

The mage lifted their head up just enough to meet her with a glare. “Do what you will with my body, you filthy demons. You can never destroy my essence. I will live on.”

Beldam used her other hand to flip down their hood, and they flinched away too late. Their face was solid black in color, featureless except for their golden eyes. But Beldam scrutinized them, gradually realizing that there was some odd fuzziness to their skin, as if it were slowly mixing with and dissolving into the air. Something about it was achingly familiar, somehow.

“How dare you?” They scowled, though their voice was quieter. “Revealing my identity to compromise my mission. You’re vile.”

“What identity?” Beldam sniffed. “I don’t even know what you—” She stopped, her mouth falling open. A memory was unfolding right before her eyes: sunset in the desert, a dusty, abandoned building beside a dried-out river valley, infinite railroad tracks stretching to either horizon.

“My god,” she said, her own voice now an awed whisper. “You’re a Smorg.”

“A what?” both the mage and Cerin said simultaneously. “Don’t make up words to insult me,” the mage added with a scoff.

Beldam released her handful of robes and the mage hit the ground hard, throwing their hood back over their face before even trying to get up. Beldam stormed away, ignoring Cerin as they rapid-fire signed to Marilyn. Her head swam, her frustration spreading as heat through her body, making her bad arm twinge.

Someone approached her from behind. “No, seriously, what’s a Smorg?” came Cerin’s voice.

“A creature even rarer than a Shadow Siren,” she muttered to the wall. “Not very well-documented. Rumored to be tied to black magic somehow. Never seen one on its own before, usually they swarm in massive groups…none of this makes any damn sense!”

The kid was quiet for a minute. Beldam could practically hear the gears turning in their head herself. “Well,” they said finally, “if you want to keep interrogating them, they haven’t left yet.”

Beldam turned, and sure enough, the mage was right where she’d dumped them. They seemed to be in a sitting position, glaring at the ground, reminiscent of a pouting child. Marilyn was circling them at a respectful if suspicious distance.

“You’re still here?” Beldam returned to them, no longer feeling vindicated when they turned their hateful gaze on her again. “If you were smart, you’d have left when given the opportunity.”

“I cannot,” the mage grumbled. “You are suggesting that I return to my superiors a failure. I’ve been demasked, I am completely empty-handed—you psychopaths even destroyed my staff! I may as well shed this body and join the ranks of the lost ones, for all the good it will do me.”

“Yeah? Sounds miserable.” Beldam didn’t even try to sound sympathetic. “Your job is to ensure that Rerun and I die, correct?”

The mage shrugged, the motion made indistinct by the shapelessness of their cloak. “That is but one way to go about it. If you are dead, you don’t resist the progression of the white magic.”

“So that’s what you’re about.” Beldam took a step forward, forcing them to look up at her. “Is there any way either of us can reset this so-called balance without sacrificing our lives?”

“Don’t be a fool. Once it has begun to consume you, it does not stop until there’s nothing left.” They pointed at Beldam’s arm. “You’re only delaying the inevitable. You are a blight on the natural order. Give up, and make all our lives easier.”

“Flattery will only get you so far.” Beldam straightened herself up and put her hands behind her back, barely able to close her good hand around the wrist of her corrupted arm.

“If the forces of black and white magic are so opposite, it would stand to reason that they are of equal potency,” she began, as if reciting a speech. “You say you’re a white mage, as in, one who specializes in white magic. You’ve proven to us all,” she jerked her good thumb behind her to indicate the pile of ash that had once been a blanket, “that white magic is every bit as destructive and consuming as black magic. And the price to pay for that kind of immense power is that it uses you as much as you it.” She leaned in close, enough to make them scoot away from her. “So why aren’t you falling apart like I am? The white magic should be devouring you. The black magic should be trying to counter it. Riddle me that.”

The mage held her gaze for a long time. Beldam watched, eager for a change in expression, sure that she had their number. But then they closed their eyes and shook their head.

“You saw my face. Do I look like I am unaffected? It is consuming me as well. The difference is that I was made for the explicit purpose of wielding magic of such a caliber.” They got to their feet for the third time, spreading their hands wide. “When the use of white magic becomes too much for this body to handle, I dispose of it. There are others waiting for me, designed so they do not fall apart like you. It is what we as mages have done for a thousand years. The very fate of the world rests upon our shoulders—we can never allow a calamity like the last to happen again!”

Beldam gaped. The mage huffed in response. “If you are quite done with your asinine questions, I would like all the pieces of my staff. I may return to my superiors with a failure on my hands, but they will send another to properly eliminate you, I’m sure. If I were you, I would not let it come to that.”

They gave her a shove as they brushed past her, but she was too stunned to move, let alone retaliate. All three sirens watched wordlessly as the mage scooped up the remains of their staff, affixing the two halves to each other with yet another flash of light. They gave Beldam one last glare before vanishing, nearly blinding her in the process.

Beldam turned to the others once she was sure they were alone again. Marilyn must have been confused, but she didn’t show it, instead giving her older sister a minute shrug. Cerin, however, looked as stricken as Beldam did.

“Well,” she said, unable to bear the silence. “That was about what I expected, truth be told.”

No one reacted. Marilyn gave Beldam the _look,_ a demand for someone to explain to her what was happening. Cerin brought their hands up to their chest, covering their wound, their fingers shaking. Then the shadows beneath them opened up and they, too, disappeared.

“Hey!” Beldam barked at the now empty space. “You know you’re not supposed to leave!”

She growled in frustration, and Marilyn placed a hand on her shoulder. “I take it it’s bad news,” she signed when Beldam glanced up.

Beldam almost felt like laughing at the understatement. “We’ll both die, most likely.”

Marilyn paused. There must have been so many things she wanted to say. Instead she signed, “I’ll go talk to them.”

“No, don’t!” Beldam grabbed her by the wrist before she knew what she was doing. “Any words of comfort from you will sound hollow. But I’m in the exact same position. Maybe they’ll be more inclined to listen to me.”

Marilyn gave her an incredulous look as she tugged her arm back. “The last time you went roaming around, you got them into this mess.”

“I know.” Beldam didn’t really need to be reminded of that. “But this time is different. Just trust me…please.”

Marilyn stared at her for a long time. Beldam didn’t move, allowing herself to be probed even if her skin crawled. At last, Marilyn sighed. “If either of you hurt anyone innocent, there will be hell to pay.”

“Oh, I know.” Beldam smiled despite herself, and not the predatory grin she’d been wearing before. “I’ll bring them back in one piece, I promise. You should…probably tell Vivian about what happened.”

Marilyn nodded. Beldam turned to leave but hesitated, and spun back around. “Marilyn, I…thank you.”

Her sister gave a smile of her own, though something about it was a little twisted. Bittersweet. She waved her hand. Beldam recognized she’d been dismissed and set out beyond the dilapidated walls, leaving Marilyn behind.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i really hope this chapter shows the effort i put into it
> 
> also this has nothing to do with anything but my birthday's in 3 days so if you feel like giving me a present and ensuring i'm in a good mood for the next week you can leave a comment maybe

The steeple was really the only place the kid could have gone. Beldam doubted they’d wanted to wander around in the wilderness, and they probably still had enough common sense that they wouldn’t have tried to go back to town…or worse, leave this dark little corner of the world entirely. She didn’t allow herself to think about that as she fought her way through the dim undergrowth, chasing the steeple’s bell tower above the pines. She approached the fenced-in perimeter of the steeple and hopped it with little trouble, using the enlarged size and stiffness of her bad arm to vault herself over.

She forwent the front entrance, instead following the outdoor porch area toward the back of the building. A tree sat just behind the building’s backmost wall, seemingly just as dead as all the non-pines in the forest. But its bark reflected gold if viewed in the moonlight at the right angle. Given a good whack, the tree would shed golden leaves, known to the natives as a delicacy and often considered a good omen. Its branches were bare.

Beldam crept to the tree’s opposite side, unsurprised but relieved all the same to see a purple shadow huddled up against it. She crouched down beside them, not too close.

They didn’t speak at first. Beldam was preparing herself to begin this no-doubt awful conversation when they beat her to it, their tone more vulnerable than she had ever heard it. “I’m not ready for this. I know I should be, but I’m not.”

Beldam said nothing, certain that she’d only put her foot in her mouth.

“This is just like before,” they muttered, bringing their hands up to their face. “The world’s always worse off having me in it. I know I’m not supposed to exist, but after last time, at least I knew I wasn’t hurting anyone by being here…”

“You don’t really believe what that blithering idiot was saying?” Beldam asked, the response coming before she could stop it. The kid glowered at her in response, their eyes especially shiny in the moonlight.

“It adds up. That mage was an asshole, but they sounded like they knew what they were talking about. And not even you completely understand all the properties of black magic. I know even less. What they said was probably the closest thing we’ll get to the truth. And the truth is we’re gonna die. We _have_ to. For the good of everyone else.”

Again, Beldam struggled to reply. What could she say? She could lie and tell them it wasn’t all bad, but they’d see through whatever hollow optimism she could offer. And her ability to comfort others was…subpar, if she was being generous.

“I still have nightmares about last time.” Their voice held the telltale tremor of someone who was trying not to cry—Beldam was very familiar with it. “But at least last time, so much was happening that I couldn’t think about it until it was too late. There’s no final battle here. Just…just quietly waiting to succumb.”

Beldam stared, some strange feeling welling up inside her, like her guts were twisting up on each other. Cerin jerked their head up and turned to stare straight at her, some raw emotion filling their teary eyes. _“You did this to me!”_

A shadow hand burst from the tree and flew at her. She yelped and scrambled away, the hand clawing at the air above her head before fizzling out. More shadows crawled from around them, all converging into one thrashing mass, then melting away without touching her. Beldam didn’t dare move, her heart pounding harder than she would have liked.

“You’re right,” she said, willing herself not to stammer. “I’m sorry.”

Silence. They were still curled up against the tree, their head buried in their arms, shoulders shaking.

“I…I know I’m to blame for this. And I’m sorry there’s nothing I can do about it, except offer commiseration and this pathetic apology.” She swallowed, an odd pain in her throat. “But…as meaningless as it sounds, you can’t give up just yet. You’re young, and the progression of magic on you seems to be especially slow. This wouldn’t be the first time things looked bleak but worked out just so, just for you.”

They didn’t reply at first, but they did pick up their head from their arms and swiped the back of their hand across their eyes. “You just…apologized to me. Have you ever apologized to anyone, and meant it, in your life?”

Beldam blinked, unsure if they expected an answer. Both already knew it anyway.

“What if things don’t get better? There’s no reason to expect them to.”

Beldam breathed in the cool twilight air. She’d asked herself that very question thousands of times. Too much time lost to staring into the abyss. “I know. It’s times like this where it’s especially important you pick yourself up and keep going, even if you don’t know why you bother. You’ll drive yourself insane with what-ifs…you just have to find one good thing, one ray of hope, and cling to it with everything you have. Doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it gives you the strength to keep going.”

“Sage advice from someone who tried to bring about the end of the world,” they muttered.

“I never said it had to be a virtuous reason.” Beldam raised an eyebrow. “My intentions may have been…misguided—” they snorted and she scowled, “--but I’ve lived to tell the tale. And now I know…I know that I was wrong. I can begin to…to…” She trailed off, the realization hitting her with the impact of a meteor.

“To atone?” Cerin turned to face her again, regarding her coldly. “Cool. Why don’t you start with someone else?”

She hesitated, trying not to appear stung. She must not have been very convincing, as they looked away but said, “I mean that the others deserve your apologies more. I know who you are, Beldam. But you have to show them, too. Before it’s too late.”

The thought of facing the people she’d hurt, her sisters especially, made her stomach turn. But this was a truth she’d known she would have to confront eventually. Maybe now was the time to stop hiding from it. She stared out into the woods again, running her tongue along her lips. “Your precocious wisdom is unsettling sometimes.”

“I think that’s just what happens when you’re partially the reincarnation of someone else.” They shifted a little where they sat. “You’re stalling. You know you have somewhere else to be.”

She knew a dismissal when she heard one, but she couldn’t help but be reluctant to leave them here alone. Even so, she rose, wincing as something cracked.

“Listen, kid, I…take care of yourself.”

She didn’t need to see their face to know they raised an eyebrow. “Whoa, careful. If I didn’t know any better, I’d almost think you cared about my well-being.”

“Shut it, brat. I mean Marilyn will kill us both if you screw around out here and hurt someone.” She swallowed hard. “Including yourself.”

“I’m on my final days as it is, Beldam, I’m not going to do anything to make them shorter.” They seemed to curl up on themself a little bit. “I just…need some time. I don’t want to face either Vivian or Marilyn like this, they’d…”

“They’ve both been there. They wouldn’t blame you.”

“But they’d worry.”

Beldam shook her head. “And here you go again with your martyr complex. Always putting others before yourself…what’s wrong with you? Have you ever in your life done anything even remotely selfish?”

They didn’t respond. She shook her head again. “Well, I’m off. You better come back soon, or I’ll be forced to retrieve you. And it will not be fun for either of us.”

“Yeah, whatever.” They gave a disaffected kind of shrug. “Good luck. And…thanks for coming to check on me.” They spoke in a monotone, but somehow Beldam could sense that they were sincere despite it. “You’re doing the right thing.”

She stopped, just for a moment. They didn’t really mean that, did they…? She turned away, vanishing among the other shadows.

She’d expected the house to be empty, but to her surprise Marilyn was still there, rummaging through the rubble and sweeping some of it out of the way. Beldam watched her for a minute, mostly to steel herself, but eventually she summoned her courage and approached, tapping her on the elbow. Her sister spun around, anger twisting her face before she recognized Beldam and relaxed. She scanned the area.

“Where’s Cerin?”

“They need some time,” Beldam replied, trying not to look uncomfortable. “They’re safe, I swear,” she added upon seeing Marilyn tense. “You can’t expect them to come to terms with something like this so quickly, you know.”

Marilyn gave a half-shrug that Beldam recognized as grudging agreement. Then she paused, giving her an odd look. “You called them a they.”

Beldam gave a stuttering, awkward laugh that she cringed at. “I, uh…learned my lesson with Vivian quite some time ago.”

Marilyn’s eyes were hidden beneath her blonde fringe, but Beldam could just tell she narrowed them suspiciously. She made to turn away again but Beldam grabbed her arm. “Wait, I—I wanted to talk to you.”

Marilyn pulled her elbow out of Beldam’s grip and crossed her arms, but looked at her sister expectantly. Beldam reminded herself to breathe, feeling as if something were snaking its way up her throat and coiling around the words she tried to force.

Cerin’s parting words surfaced in her mind: “You’re doing the right thing.” _Stars, I hope so._

“Marilyn, I…I wanted to say that…I’m sorry. For…for everything.”

Marilyn didn’t react whatsoever. Beldam felt her eyes on her, though. She continued, stumbling over herself, “Look, I just—the kid—I know I should have—” Snowflakes were falling from the fingertips of her good hand. Marilyn reached out, taking Beldam’s hand in her own.

“Relax _,_ ” she mouthed. She wasn’t smiling, but Beldam didn’t detect any anger, either…yet.

She obeyed, taking in another deep breath and feeling her hand slip out of her sister’s. “I’m…I know I should have said this a long time ago. Centuries, to be exact. I…I’m so sorry for everything I put you through, Marilyn. None of it was justified. It was just…” She dropped her gaze, scowling at the ground, before remembering that Marilyn had to read her lips and looking back up. “I did all of that because of my own insecurities. And instead of bettering myself, I just…ran and hid, over and over. I’m a cocktail of abysmal mental health and even worse decisions.” She noted vaguely that the stiffness in her bad arm seemed to be lessening again, or maybe she was just too focused on keeping her composure to pay the pain much attention. “But none of that is an excuse. Nothing I did was excusable. I just…wanted to let you know, before I die. I truly am sorry for all of it, Marilyn. I don’t expect you to forgive me.”

She tried her best to cross her arms but succeeded mostly in hugging her bad arm to her chest. Marilyn, of course, was silent, but she did drop her arms, glancing at her fingers as if struggling to find what to say next. Her following signs were slow and deliberate.

“I can’t forgive you just yet, Beldam. But I do appreciate that you’ve finally come to your senses.” Marilyn cracked a tiny smile, just as bittersweet as the last time Beldam had seen it. “You know I’m not the only one you should be apologizing to if you’re this set on turning over a new leaf.”

“I know,” Beldam mumbled, suddenly feeling as if she were the younger sister instead. “I’ll…I’ll talk to Vivian, of course, as soon as possible—”

“Not just her, either.” Marilyn placed one hand underneath her opposite elbow. With the other, she opened and closed her fingers twice in a motion like the snapping of jaws—the sign they’d made up for “Piranha Plant.” Beldam stared at her for a moment, then swore.

“I completely forgot about her—about them both,” she muttered.

“They certainly haven’t forgotten about you,” Marilyn replied, and traced one finger down the right side of her jaw. Beldam shuddered.

“You’re in luck. Cerin the elder isn’t likely to want to travel. But I think Lillian is capable of passing your message on.”

“You’re conspiring against me is what’s happening,” Beldam grumbled.

“Forgiveness is earned. Redemption is worked toward. It’s not supposed to be easy.” Now Marilyn’s smile was a little less bitter, a little more genuine. “I’ll see if I can’t bring Lillian here.”

“Here?” Beldam repeated, her mouth going dry. “Right now? Marilyn, wait!”

She was too late. Marilyn slipped into the shadows, and for the first time in ages, Beldam was alone in the house.

She paced like a caged animal, her bad arm cramping. Unlike her sisters, Beldam didn’t trust Lillian not to attack her on sight. Nor did she trust her own abilities to hold up in case she needed to defend herself. She’d worked with the plant siren and knew her demureness was completely an act—maybe even one she intentionally cultivated. And she knew how to hold a grudge.

But as much as Beldam wanted to resent this situation, blame Marilyn for forcing her into it…this was, again, something that needed to be done. Thinking this made it just a little easier to hold her head high as there was movement out of her peripheral.

Lillian made her way into the house, sidestepping the remains of the wall with a look of…something. Not quite disgust, not quite horror. Regardless, when Beldam cleared her throat, the plant siren’s head snapped upward, and her face darkened.

“Lillian,” Beldam said with a confidence she didn’t feel.

“Beldam.” Lillian’s voice was as cold as the surrounding stone. “Marilyn insisted I come here.”

“She didn’t ruin the surprise, did she?”

“No, but I can guess why you wanted me. You’ve seen the error of your ways and want to apologize.” The moonlight gave her skin an eerie glow and glinted off what little Beldam could see of her eyes through her hair. “I don’t want to hear it.”

Beldam twitched. That wasn’t the response she’d been hoping for…but it had been the one she expected.

“Why is it only _now_ that your guilt catches up to you?” Lillian advanced on her, her frown deepening. “Where was this remorse years ago? You lost once and that should have been the end of it, but you kept going.” Now she was inches from Beldam, towering over her. “You tried twice to resurrect the Shadow Queen, knowing full well what would happen to this world and its people if you succeeded.  You manipulated and lied to me for months to achieve this end. You disfigured my wife’s face!” The ground next to her bulged, blades of grass poking through the earth. “You don’t deserve the closure you seek. I will not be the one to give it to you.”

“I didn’t expect you to,” Beldam said, watching the ground around her with a wary eye. “I’m not doing this for me. I’m doing it because…it’s what’s right.”

“You expect me to believe that?” Lillian scoffed. “You’ve never given a damn about anything except yourself, much less about right versus wrong.”

“I’ve had a change of heart,” Beldam replied, surprising herself at how even her tone was. “It’s too late for it to do me any good, but…while I still have time, I should at least do the bare minimum. My sisters ought to know that…that they didn’t deserve what I did to them. And that extends to you, as well.”

“I _know_ that,” Lillian snapped. “This half-assed apology of yours isn’t going to fix anything!”

“At least I can say I’ve tried.”

“That’s still not…” Lillian trailed off, her frustration momentarily releasing her. “When did you become so…okay with this?”

“I’m not.” Beldam met her eyes, for once not even minding that Lillian was nearly twice her height. “I’ll never be ‘okay’ with what I did. But fighting it has gotten me nowhere.”

Lillian stared, borderline suspicious again. “How do I know you’re not being manipulative?”

“What could I want from you?” Beldam shook her head. “My days are numbered, and nothing will change that. This way, you at least know I regret my actions. I’m…sorry for using you, Lillian. And, if you could, tell Cerin that I’m sorry for, uh… ‘disfiguring’ her.”

Lillian held her gaze for a long time, finally giving a minute shrug. “I’ll tell her. Truthfully, she likes the scar…she thinks it makes her look tough.” The corner of her mouth twitched, as if she were trying not to smile. “And, now that I think about it…if you hadn’t brought back the Queen, she wouldn’t have remade Cerin. You, albeit indirectly and unintentionally, are responsible for returning her to me. For that, I’ll tentatively call us even.”

Now it was Beldam’s turn to stare.  Lillian looked away, around the shambles of the building. “Where’s…?”

“Out,” Beldam said, recovering herself. “They’re fine, just needed some solitude.”

“That’s not unusual,” Lillian said, cracking another smile. “If I’m passing on your message, you’re obligated to pass on mine. Tell them…tell them we’re thinking of them. And if there’s anything either of us can do to help, let us know.”

Beldam nodded. Lillian turned to go, but then she threw a glance over her shoulder. “I wish you luck.” Then she vanished into the shadows pooling beneath.

Beldam exhaled in a low whistle, eyeing the bulging earth with distrust and skirting around it. She wondered vaguely where Marilyn had gone as she spied a pile of various things on the ground at the entrance of the house—the afflicted sirens’ usual rations. Marilyn must have dropped it all when she showed up, just in time to give the white mage a few thousand volts.

The available food was neither exciting nor extravagant, but Beldam couldn’t really bring herself to care. Her appetite, which had long abandoned her to the point she considered it dead, now returned with a vengeance.  It at least meant she could stomach yet more cold dishes made from cheap mushrooms.  She left the kid their share, for when they came back.

If they came back.

She chastised herself for even daring to think that and returned to the back wall of the house, beneath the roof. She was lucky the mage hadn’t vaporized any more of her stuff than they had, she thought not without bitterness as she glanced over her few meager belongings. She approached the upside-down half of the table that she and her sisters had once sat around…it hadn’t survived the roof caving in, almost nothing did. Since contracting the magic illness, she’d hung her hat on one of the legs, figuring no one was around to see her without. Now she ran the fingers of her bad hand across the brim, careful not to press too hard and damage it. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had this much dexterity or sensation, she realized. The claws that had consumed her fingers were clunky in movement and numb in feeling. But for the first time since the whiteness had begun to take her over, she could almost pretend like they were her own again.

She lifted the hat off the leg and put it on. The faintest of smiles crossed her face at the pressure around her head, at the lowering of the brim over her eyes. She hadn’t realized she missed it this much. Now she was that much closer to being a Shadow Siren again, not some half-crazed monster waiting to waste away. Just to prove it, she raised her good hand and felt a breeze of cool air kiss her cheeks, watched tiny flurries of half-formed snow flutter from her fingertips to the ground, where they melted on contact.

“Beldam?”

She choked, whipping around and nearly slicing herself open with her bad hand. Vivian was standing where the fallen wall once had, one hand shyly clutching the elbow of her opposite arm. Beldam’s first instinct was to yell at her for sneaking up on her, but she bit her tongue, her heart pounding.

“Marilyn said you have something to tell me,” Vivian said, stepping forward. She spoke quietly, as she always did, but there was no stutter in her words and no timidity in her approach. Beldam envied her composure. The irony wasn’t lost on her.

“I do. Come here, Vivian.”

She met her sister halfway, standing among the eroded walls, the moon overseeing them both. Beldam paused, staring out into the trees and listening to the wind breathing through their needles. It was much harder to look at Vivian directly. She took her hat back off and held it in front of her as if trying to hide behind it. Some dark concoction of shame and disgust that had been brewing inside her for countless years was rising to the surface.

She must have been taking too long, because Vivian prompted, “Beldam?” The concern in her voice made something in Beldam’s chest contort painfully. Words formed and died in her throat. Every disparaging thing she’d ever said to her youngest sister, every insult, every petty jab at her insecurities, replayed before her eyes. It was enough to make her wish the guilt would form a noose around her throat. How could Vivian stand to look at her, after all she’d put her through?

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to the ground. She squeezed her eyes shut and felt her hands tighten around her hat. All the suffering she had caused her, all the pain she made her endure, and she’d willfully ignored the damage she’d done.

She didn’t know if Vivian had heard her or not; her sister was quiet for a very long time. With each drawn-out second of silence, Beldam waited to crumble. She could feel it thrumming inside her, with the understated power of a storm thundering miles away, but it seemed to refuse to close the distance. These walls had to come down, this dam had to break—but it felt like she was beating at it with her bare fists. No tears came. No catharsis.

She was voiceless. Imprisoned inside the barricades she’d built herself. Try as she might to scrabble in the dirt for the things she needed now, the things she’d always needed, the things she’d so carelessly tossed out of her reach…it was useless. She was without repair, she’d always known it to be true. What an idiot she’d been to hope otherwise.

Vivian crept closer, with the caution of one approaching a wild animal. Beldam couldn’t have moved if she wanted to. But she still inhaled sharply as Vivian wrapped her arms around her. The warmth of this embrace, the distinct scent of her sister’s hair, her steady, measured breathing…it chipped away at Beldam’s protective barriers. It ached, the pain dull but lingering, coming and going like the tide. For once, she allowed it to hurt. And then she began to fall apart.

It was slow, agonizingly so. Her throat throbbed and her eyes stung, her breathing hitching and shuddering. When the tears finally did come, they burned her skin like acid. And she dissolved, wracked with sobs, clinging to her youngest sister for dear life, knowing she’d be lost without her.

It could have lasted centuries for all she knew, but Vivian didn’t move until Beldam pulled away from her herself, dragging her good arm across her eyes. Some part of her was revolted, ashamed, but so much louder was the relief, the burden easing, for just a moment.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated, her tongue snagging on the words, her voice so thick and heavy with tears she cringed.

Vivian fiddled with her gloves for a while, as if desperately searching for something to say. She eventually settled on, “You’re…you’re okay, right?”

Even after all of this…“I don’t deserve your concern,” Beldam mumbled, trying but failing to meet Vivian’s eyes.

“You’re my sister, Beldam.” Vivian gave her a weak smile.

“What does that matter? It didn’t stop me from abusing you the way I did.” Beldam finally wrenched her gaze away from the ground, brushing her hair out of her face. Being exposed like this made her stomach turn, it always had, but Vivian needed to see her at her most vulnerable. “I’m a coward. I should have done this long ago, and I knew it. But I…I couldn’t bring myself to face you. To admit I’d wronged you, and continued to wrong you because I couldn’t swallow my pride.” She glanced away, scowling at herself. “You suffered because I couldn’t handle my own issues. There is nothing I could ever say or do to remedy that, but…this is my last chance to try.” Her arm ached a little, and she wrapped her other hand around it and squeezed it hard. “At least soon you’ll finally be rid of me.”

“I never wanted that.” There was a tremor in Vivian’s voice that gave away her emotion, too, but to Beldam’s shock, she still sounded relatively collected. Much more than Beldam herself had been a minute ago. “I…it’s been painful. I don’t need to tell you that. But…as much as everyone expected me to resent you…as much as I wanted to…I couldn’t. You did those things because you hurt, too.” One of her hands came up to wipe at her eyes. “I’d always hoped you’d realize you could change. Like I did, and like Marilyn did. The three of us have seen too much together to give up on each other…to give up on the idea of things eventually getting better.”

Beldam glanced down, a bitter smile pulling at her lips. “You had such faith in me even after everything I did…and I kept letting you down. What did I do to deserve a sister as compassionate as you?”

“It’s…not about deserving.” Vivian gave her a watery smile and wiped her face again. “I think…I think it’s just about doing your best. _Being_ your best. For you, not for or because of anyone else.”

Beldam met her eyes again, she hoped more strongly this time. “I never realized you were this profound, Vivian. That’s my fault, of course. I haven’t been my best…in a long time. Maybe ever. But I’m going to change that.”

Unintentionally or not, Vivian had brushed her hair out of the way of her eyes. They widened. Beldam nodded. “I know I don’t have much time left, but…the shadows haven’t reclaimed me yet. Until they do, I’m going to try to right my wrongs. It won’t save me, but…I’m done being a coward.” She paused, the warmth of conviction, of purpose, flooding her. She hadn’t felt this sure of herself since the Shadow Queen’s first return.

“You really mean it?” Vivian’s eyes lit up, red and fiery like her magic. Beldam felt her lips part in a genuine smile, without her conscious input.

“I promise on everything that’s ever mattered to me.” She placed her good hand on her chest. “But…I’d urge you not to get too excited. I know the damage I’ve done will long outlive the little I manage to fix. I’m…not doing this to be absolved. But I understand if that’s a little difficult to swallow.”

Vivian said nothing and Beldam dropped her hand. “All I ask is that you take your time. I’ve accepted that…should you ever forgive me, should anyone I’ve hurt even consider it, I’ll be long gone. Lillian said I don’t deserve closure, and she’s right.”

She had more to say, but Vivian nearly tackled her in a hug strong enough to rival Marilyn’s. Beldam wheezed but didn’t fight it, and eventually Vivian released her, tears trailing down her cheeks.

“Always so emotional,” Beldam murmured, ignoring the lingering wetness at the corners of her own eyes.

“I just…I didn’t want it to end this way,” Vivian said, hardly louder than a whisper.

“Neither did I. But that’s what’s happening. I’m sorry.” Beldam glanced away, conscious of the pain flickering through her bad arm. “Even after all of this, you’ll still have Marilyn, and—and the other people you met before.” She caught herself before she mentioned the kid. “They all treated you like they should have. Don’t waste your time mourning me, who refused to.”

“I’m still losing a sister.” There was a defiance in Vivian’s expression now, subtle but not subdued. “And stuff like this will just…keep happening, no matter what. We can’t live forever. Who’s to say Marilyn won’t be next? What if I am? I just…” She hugged her arms to her chest, now avoiding Beldam’s eyes. “I don’t want to be alone.”

“Vivian. I say this with the utmost confidence: you’ll never be alone.” The ache in Beldam’s throat had returned, but she refused to acknowledge it. “Just tonight, you’ve shown me more kindness and understanding than I’ve ever deserved. It’s in your nature. People like you just because you’re you. You’ll have more friends and allies than you’ll know what to do with.”

“Maybe…but it’s not the same,” Vivian mumbled, rubbing her eyes.

Beldam sighed. “I know. That’s what happens when you get attached to mortals, like I always warned you.” She glanced over the wall at the moon, raising an eyebrow. “I’ve said my piece. You’d best get home…what time is it?”

“Something like four in the morning, last I checked.”

“Are you serious?” Beldam shook her head in disdain. Twilight Town may have been the most suitable place for Shadow Sirens, but she didn’t appreciate how easily living here threw off her sense of time. The illness and the tricks it played on her cognition certainly didn’t help. “Go home. We— _I_ have work to do tomorrow, and I’d rather you were awake for it.”

“I’m just as nocturnal as you are, Beldam, I’m used to this.” Vivian shot her an exasperated look that didn’t really have any bite to it. Then her gaze softened even more. “I’m going to miss you.”

“No, you won’t, and you shouldn’t.”

“This you,” Vivian clarified, averting her eyes.

Beldam winced like the simple words had stabbed her, but she dared not let herself freeze up. “I had no plans to die tonight. There’s still time, I think. We’ll…we’ll start anew tomorrow.”

Vivian had mostly turned away, but Beldam still caught the hint of a smile, even if it was directed at the ground. She looked like she wanted to say something else, but instead settled for, “Good night, Beldam.”

She left without another word, and Beldam breathed again. She felt light, almost airy, but with this lack of weight came a frailty she was unused to. She was barely able to drag herself under the overhang of the house. She collapsed there, in a very dignified fashion, with a groan at the sensation traveling along her arm. It almost felt as if something beneath the skin was struggling to break free, pulling at her muscles and making them twitch uncontrollably. But it was near impossible for her to concentrate on it, the exhaustion from the day’s events swept her so. She closed her eyes and her mind dropped into the abyss.

She slept more peacefully than she had in decades.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shit gets real pt 3
> 
> the end of semester crunch is upon me so i'm going to not really update much until after finals but i do have the rest of this written (finally) and ready to be posted so there's that
> 
> been working hard on this i hope it shows

Beldam awoke slowly. Her mind was only functioning at about half its capacity as she picked herself up off the ground and mashed the heels of her palms into her eyes. The moon, of course, hadn’t moved from its place in the sky, and she glared back at it as she tried to decipher how much time had passed. On instinct, she put her hat back on and squinted around the room, cracking all her joints with a grimace. Even the knuckles of her right hand popped when she tried them.

Wait.

She turned her hand over in disbelief. It was its regular size and shape, her fingers no longer the thick, claw-like appendages she’d grown used to. Her skin was still that deathly shade of white, but now the discoloration only reached to her elbow. She rubbed her palm with her other hand, wiggled her fingers, rotated her wrist. All her sensation and mobility had returned, like nothing had ever happened.

There was one final test before she dared celebrate. She held out her palm, concentrating. A rush of power raced to her hand, and a chill breeze blew from behind her, snowflakes scattering from in between her fingers. She laughed out loud, unable to control herself. It was gone. She was _free._

“Rerun, look!” she called across the house, holding out her arm. She was sure she looked ridiculous, beaming the way she was, but she didn’t care. “I don’t know how, but it fixed itself! And I feel better than I have in years! There’s still a way—you have a chance after all!”

It occurred to her a moment too late that she was shouting at an empty corner. The only trace of the kid’s existence was their hat and the blanket, both untouched and exactly the way they had left it however many hours ago. Beldam’s enthusiasm evaporated, and in its absence, something like fear consumed her. She swore out loud, and sank into the shadows.

Cerin was not still under the golden tree. She wasn’t exactly surprised, even as she circled the trunk three or four times, but it didn’t stop the icy fingers of dread from creeping over her. She looked up to the steeple and scowled, but approached it anyway, slipping through a small gap in the fence and entering the wooden door to the foyer.

It didn’t take long for a couple floating Boos to notice her, and she put on her best negotiation glower as they swooped down with devious grins.

“I’m not in the mood for games, you wannabe poltergeists,” she snapped before either of them could speak. “Have you seen someone who looks like me, black hair, taller than I am, rather unfortunate cut in their chest?”

“Oh, the creepy one?” one of the Boos said, only to be smacked upside the head by their companion. “Who wants to know?” the second challenged.

“This is a matter of life and death!” Beldam said, her fingertips tingling with her magic. “Just tell me where they are and I’ll leave you in peace.”

“We don’t negotiate with outsiders,” sneered the second Boo. “We scare ‘em! Who do you think you are, coming into our home and making demands?”

Their smirk faltered as Beldam opened her arms wide, a chill like the northern winds sweeping across the dusty floor. The control she’d sorely missed, the fact that she could use her powers without anything weighing her down…she had to fight not to smile. The other Boo backed away, inch by inch.

“This is not a hill I want to die on,” they murmured, nudging their friend. “I thought we all agreed to just leave the shadow-people alone after, you know…”

“You’re such a nonconfrontational wimp,” the second Boo sniffed, but they turned back to Beldam, sulking. “Okay, witch, you win. Your friend’s been skulking around outside, they looked kinda panicked. Last we saw they were heading out there.” They pointed at the opposite wall from where Beldam entered, further into the deepest part of the woods. “Now get out of here.”

“If I find out you’re lying to me,” Beldam said, clenching her fists. Now frost crept across the worn carpet and up one of the nearby columns. “I will make you wish you stayed dead. And that’s a promise.”

Her exit would have been more dramatic if she sank into the shadows, but because she couldn’t really visualize that specific part of the surrounding woods, she left through the front door, the eyes of countless Boos following her out. The damn rain had started up again, making her snarl with disgust. But she surged onward, ignoring the icy droplets that drenched her.

The pines at least provided more cover than the open courtyard of the steeple did, but there was no easy path on this side of the building, away from town. Beldam fought her way through thorns and thickets, her eyes peeled for any sign of the younger siren. If they were on the run from something…she had an idea of what it might be, and had never so fervently hoped she was wrong.

She got her answer when, entangled in a particularly thick clump of undergrowth and trying to tease her way out of it, she saw a flash of white light above the treetops. Like lightning, silent as the grave. She froze the plants ensnaring her and shattered them all with a flick of her wrist, hurrying toward the explosion of light.

Another flash, and she heard the distinctive sound of splintering and groaning wood. A moment later, a thud. Thunder growled in the distance. She slowed herself, creeping through the shadows and squinting against the rain. Dread was oozing through her veins, viscous and burning. It took her a minute to realize it wasn’t all her doing.

She turned. Fifteen feet away was a monster.

Not actually, she realized a moment later, not that it made her heart slow any. No, now she could recognize the kid amongst the swirling mass of writhing shadow that encased them like a semi-opaque shell. The cut in their chest, with its unearthly white glow, was pulsating through the gloom. Their eyes were wild, unfocused, unrecognizing, their pupils blown so far their eyes looked black instead of purple.

She may have lived this very same madness herself, but here something was different. Their powers had sprung to life, while she couldn’t have manifested her ice no matter how much she’d wanted to…she stepped forward, deliberately, trying not to make noise but catch their attention through sight. Her movement made them lock those empty eyes on her.

“Kid,” she said, her voice lost to the rain. Whatever—if what she thought was happening was true, they’d find them both soon. No point in trying to be quiet. “Cerin!” she called.

Speaking their name elicited no reaction whatsoever. They just stared. A shiver raced down her back, and she fought to keep it from riding out through the rest of her body.

“Do you recognize me? It’s Beldam.” She approached again, watching the shadows undulate. She made sure to keep her hands visible, open. “I won’t hurt you—I’m here to help.”

They blinked twice. Their pupils shrunk a bit, some clarity—some _sanity_ —returning. Beldam breathed again. If all she had to do was talk them out of it, this wasn’t going to be nearly as bad as she had feared.

“Listen. There’s a way out of this—look.” She held out her right arm, showing them where the white skin cut off at her elbow. She also tilted her head, to prove that the blackness was no longer consuming her face. “I don’t know how or why it happened, but I’m cured. I told you there was still hope. And I have an idea of where to start—”

Her first cue was Cerin’s eyes dilating again. Her second was the protective shadows around them squirming twice as hard. She missed them both. Something struck her tail where it met the ground, and a burning sensation swept up her body like a forest fire.

She collapsed with a screech. Tears sprang to her eyes, her muscles convulsing. Her fingers dug into the ground and her teeth into the inside of her lip, the taste of blood blooming across her tongue. It was eating away at her, leaving just an empty shell, the pain was making her stomach heave—

And then it eased, just a little. Enough that she could move. Her battle instincts working where her mind did not, she pushed herself into a sitting position. Against her better judgement, she looked down at herself and swooned. Where her tail normally would be, there was nothing. A blackened stub where her body ended, untethered to the ground.

There was something looming over her and she drew her head up, trembling with the effort. Another hooded figure like the one yesterday, clad in scarlet instead of white, the gold trim shimmering in the rain. Another staff, aimed at her, its glimmering orb pointed at her throat.

“Below the belt shots are cheap,” she slurred, the pain slowing her tongue.

“Silence, siren.” This mage’s voice was a little deeper than the white one’s, and more powerful. A church bell in comparison to the white mage’s chimes. Beldam almost wanted to laugh at how delirious with pain she was. Instead she nearly whimpered as the red mage pulled the orb away from her, but stuck the other end of their staff beneath her chin and pried her head upward.

“That is one of them,” another voice came over the mage’s shoulder. Ravaged by pain as she was, Beldam couldn’t muster a scowl as the white mage from before appeared behind this new one.

The red mage didn’t move, though their golden eyes narrowed in the shade of their hood. “I sense nothing from this one.”

A several-second, dumbfounded silence. The white mage squeaked, “What?”

“It is clean.” The red mage removed their staff from Beldam’s chin, and her head dropped to her chest, her vision swimming. “Look.”

“But—that is impossible! It was consumed by the stuff—its arm is still white!”

“My orb detects nothing.” A muffled thump that Beldam recognized. The red mage had struck the bottom of their staff against the ground. “I do not enjoy being made to waste my time.”

“But—”

“We are moving on.” The swishing of robes. “It does not matter, that one is wounded and will die shortly anyway. We must focus on the other one. It is very similar to the one that became the great calamity—it must be eliminated.”

She heard no more discussion after this, though it took several agonizing seconds to gather the energy to pick her head up and wrench open her eyes. She was alone but for the rain. Cerin, ever the pragmatist, must have fled. But they weren’t going to last long if these mages were so serious about hunting them down.

Speaking of lasting long. She again looked down at her body and took several deep breaths. With every passing second, the pain faded by a fraction. Her mind became less murky, more aware of her surroundings. The minutes ticked by, and with the gradual delicacy of a spider spinning a silken web, her tail regrew.

It was an accumulative process, first a tiny lavender wisp breaking forth from the charred stub. The shadows around her seemed to lean in closer as the magic seeped from them, lengthening the wisp and darkening it to the same hue as the rest of her skin. As she watched and waited, her mind’s eye offered her images she’d rather forget: dying Shadow Sirens, their bodies unraveling, the dark magic that held them together returning to the earth. The tether, where the magic was at its most concentrated and least stable, always was the first to go…

At last her new tail made its first connection to the ground, and she felt whole. She stood up, wobbling a little but quickly finding her balance. Shaken as she was, there was no more pain. Her hat had fallen off when she fell, so she picked it up and put it back on, drawing her arm across her eyes. That idiot thought they’d left her to die? Cutting off a siren’s tail would incapacitate them, and certainly make them suffer, but not kill them. A healthy siren would regrow their tether in a matter of minutes. She would make those mages pay dearly for their ignorance.

She followed them, and caught up with ease despite their several-minute head start. They clearly weren’t accustomed to traveling through thick woodland like this: their long robes got caught on brambles, their hoods yanked by branches, and the one in red regularly stopped to stare at the orb on their staff. Beldam resigned herself to lurking in the shadows nearby, watching their every move. As much as she wanted to, it probably wasn’t best to confront them by herself…she scanned the place for any sign of Cerin. 

Nothing interesting happened for long enough that Beldam wondered if she was just wasting time. But then the red mage whipped out their staff and fired a blast of blinding light into the distance. There was a crunch as the magic hit something solid, followed by a scream.

Beldam’s blood ran cold.

“I think you hit it,” the white mage whispered, peering over the red mage’s shoulder at their staff. Beldam crept forward, too, getting as close as possible while still concealed in the undergrowth. She had never been so thankful for the rain that covered up her sound.

The orb at first was the same as before, appearing to contain some kind of flickering, whitish fire. But the movement died down, and on the perimeter of the sphere emerged a tiny speck of black, to the northwest.

“No,” the red mage growled. They straightened up and the black speck vanished, the glittering light inside coming to life once more. “It went this way.”

The two mages charged off, crashing through the undergrowth with all the grace and subtlety of the king of Koopas. It was no wonder Cerin was so easily able to evade them.

Rather than continue stalking them, Beldam followed the trajectory of the magic blast, suppressing a shiver when she approached a tree with a smoldering crater in its trunk. She looked around, her heart pounding, rainwater dripping from the brim of her hat and streaming down her face. She’d thought she recognized that scream…the implications made her feel ill.

A nearby bush shuddered. A shadow emerged from behind it, alive and unharmed, peering around with trepidation as if expecting something to leap out at her. Relief swamped Beldam so quickly she felt lightheaded, but she dared not show it. “Vivian!” she hissed.

Her youngest sister jumped as if Beldam had fired a cannon instead. She turned so quickly her hair swung around and hit her in the face. “Beldam?!” she spluttered as she brushed it away.

“Keep it down,” Beldam whispered, suddenly remembering the trigger-happy mages.

“Beldam!” Vivian pointed at Beldam’s arm, her shock clear even without her eyes visible.

“Yes, I _know!”_ Beldam ran her fingers through her hair, regaining a hold on her temper before it got away from her. “It’s a long story. What are you doing here?”

“We came to check on you,” Vivian said, stepping out from behind the bush and wringing water from her hair.

“We? Marilyn’s here too?” Beldam raised her hand and pinched the bridge of her nose. “There are idiots wielding immensely destructive magic running wild out here, and you left her on her own?!”

“How were we supposed to know that?” Vivian retorted. “We went to the house and both you and Cerin were gone. We feared the worst…Marilyn seemed to think one of you would be out here, and we split up to cover more ground. I trust her to handle herself.”

She brought her hands up to her chest and glanced around nervously. “Did you see Cerin? They were here just a second ago, and I tried to talk to them, but…they ran away when that mage shot at us. At them, I mean, I don’t think the mage saw me.”

“Let’s keep it that way.” The gears in Beldam’s head were turning. Being able to think clearly, without the disease casting a literal shadow over her higher thinking, was something she’d taken for granted and sorely missed. “The element of surprise may be our saving grace. Those mages don’t know you exist, and they think I’m dead.”

“What? Why?”

Beldam winced despite herself, reluctant to relive it for even a moment. “They cut off my tail.”

“They cut…” The color drained from Vivian’s face. It might have been comical if Beldam didn’t still feel some phantom twinges of pain at the mere thought.

“Well, more like burned it away, but…they blasted me with white magic and it dissolved completely. Whatever spells they’re using, they’re incredibly dangerous—if they’d aimed higher, I would be dead. But these fools don’t know anything about Shadow Sirens, much less how to kill one. We can use that to our advantage.”

“I…I guess,” Vivian said, still looking somewhat pale.

“They’re tracking Cerin as we speak,” Beldam continued, peering around a nearby pine into the darkness of the forest. “They’re detecting the black magic within them, or something like that. Cerin can outrun them easily, but…not forever. With every passing second, they succumb more and more…” She turned to Vivian. “It’s almost certainly going to come to blows. We need Marilyn.”

“She’s near the steeple,” Vivian said, pointing back the way Beldam had come. “She decided to stay there just in case something happened. And we thought maybe Cerin would gravitate toward something familiar like a building.”

“No, they’re far too gone for that,” Beldam muttered as she squeezed past Vivian, her sister falling into line behind her. She remembered Cerin’s vacant eyes and shivered, the chill of the rain getting the better of her.

She kept an eye out for the mages as they traveled, but she saw no more flashes of light and heard no more toppling of trees. Either they were impossibly bad at their job, or something was occupying them…she tried not to think about it as she pushed through the undergrowth.

The steeple’s spire above even the tallest trees was their guide. Vivian spotted Marilyn before Beldam did, cuffing her older sister on the shoulder and pointing when Beldam turned to snap at her.

Marilyn was just another shadow among the pines, standing as straight and still as the trunks around her, arms crossed. But she dropped them when her sisters approached, disbelief crawling over her face as she met eyes with Beldam. She indicated her own right arm.

“Not now,” Beldam signed, glancing around just to make sure they hadn’t been followed. She’d missed being able to properly communicate with her sister…and then she realized she lacked the words she needed. She caught Vivian’s eye. “We don’t have a proper sign for ‘mage,’ do we?”

Vivian shrugged. Marilyn must have read her lips, because she pantomimed holding a staff with one hand, and with the other covered her forehead like the hoods they wore. Then she added an obscene gesture that almost made Beldam choke laughing. She’d missed Marilyn’s foul mouth even more.

“There’s only two,” she told Marilyn. “They intend to kill. We need them out of the way so we can focus on helping Cerin.”

Marilyn cracked her knuckles and Beldam grinned.

“How can we help them?” Vivian whispered into Beldam’s ear from over her shoulder.

“I’m…getting there,” Beldam muttered back. Her “plan” so far was less than that and more like a vague hypothesis. “I just know we can’t have idiots flinging lethal magic around.”

Something white moved in of the corner of her eye. Her heart flew into her throat, accompanied by Vivian gasping beside her. She turned, expecting the worst, but instead of the mages, she was greeted by Cerin’s twisting shadows and blank eyes, the ghostly white core inside them pulsing. Marilyn, seeing them for the first time, inhaled sharply.

“No sudden movements,” Beldam hissed, holding out one hand in front of Marilyn so she got the message too. The young siren looked exhausted, hunched over on themself, their chest visibly heaving even if the steady palpitations of their affliction masked most of its movement. The same blackness that had crept up Beldam’s face was doing the same to them, forming a chokehold around their neck and inching down their waist. The white had consumed nearly their entire abdomen.

“What do we do?” Vivian whispered, the terror in her voice making Beldam’s stomach flip.

“Nothing,” she said, noticing how Cerin’s eyes unfocused. They didn’t appear to have seen the sisters at all. “Not yet. The mages are on their tail, we need to—”

The forest thundered, the underbrush snapping and cracking. Something was barreling through with no regard for the vegetation. “Speak of the devil,” Beldam sneered. She knocked her hand against Marilyn’s and pointed in the direction of the noise.

Cerin heard it, too—it was impossible not to. They twisted their head around, searching for an escape, but their posture and their labored breathing made it clear they were too tired to keep running. So they remained. The shadows surrounding them, like black flames, rose so high that they began to snap needles and twigs off the trees above.

_“You will not evade me!”_

The red mage burst forth from the clumped bushes. Beldam wanted to laugh at how haggard they looked, their hood torn, various forest debris sticking out of their long robes. What was less funny was the way their voice boomed, and the way their staff and that dreadful shiny orb pointed at the center of Cerin’s chest.

“It ends here, _siren!”_ the mage roared, the hand that held the staff trembling with their rage.

Cerin, to their credit, did not back down. On the contrary, they seemed to rear back like an animal balancing on its hind legs, the shadows rushing around them like a river’s current and spilling onto the ground.

The mage fired. The burst of light was on top of Cerin in an instant, but something shot up from the shadows around them, snatching the blast of magic from the air. The light fizzled away within the grasp of the darkness.

“Now!” Beldam said, but Marilyn beat her to it, clapping her hands once. Beldam barely had enough time to squeeze her eyes shut and brace herself for the eye-searing flash and cacophonous boom that followed.

The mage was still standing, but the grass an inch in front of them had caught fire, the embers sputtering as the rain put them out. A floating hand clutched at their chest and their golden eyes were wide as dinner plates, scanning the area in a semi-panic. Marilyn clicked her tongue against her teeth and vanished into the shadows. Vivian followed. Beldam took one final deep breath before doing the same.

She emerged in front of the mage, her teeth bared and snowflakes spiraling off her fingertips. Her sisters stood on her either side, poised to fight, though Vivian threw a worried glance over her shoulder at Cerin behind them.

“What is the meaning of this?” By now the mage had recovered, though the hand that held the staff still quaked. “You!” they spat, jabbing it in her direction. “You should be dead!”

 “As if someone like you could kill me,” Beldam scoffed, ignoring the horrified look Vivian was giving her. “This is your final warning. Leave this place forever, or suffer some truly awful consequences!”

 _“SILENCE!”_ The orb gleamed in the moonlight, and the hand that held it shook so hard Beldam almost felt dizzy looking at it. “I will send your entire species to the Underwhere!”

“The what?” Beldam blinked, furrowing her brow. Vivian gave her a minute shrug, so she shook her head. “Oh, whatever. It’s clear that the only rationale your type understands is force, so…” She held out her hands, the cold swirling around her, turning the rain that fell to slush.

“Showtime, my lovelies!” she said with a wicked grin. “Marilyn! Vivian! Let’s give this fool a demonstration, shall we? Let them know the true might of the three Shadow Sirens!”

“With pleasure,” Vivian growled, the malice in her voice making Beldam want to step back. So much heat was radiating from her that Beldam felt like she was standing next to a furnace instead of her sister.

Marilyn grunted, sparks flying from her fingers.

The mage swung the staff again, and the sisters scattered, the blast of white magic swallowed by the growing darkness behind them. “Make this quick!” Beldam barked, hanging behind for just a second as Marilyn and Vivian advanced. The mage swung a third time, but the orb sputtered, leaking silvery fluid that sizzled the grass it dripped on. Vivian snapped her fingers and the mage’s robes caught fire. They yelped and stumbled away, right into Marilyn, who gave them a single swift blow to the back of the head. They slumped to the ground, tiny embers burning at the seams of their robes.

For good measure, Marilyn reached out and plucked the staff from their grasp. She swung it like a baseball bat and shattered the orb against the nearest tree, and dropped the now-useless golden rod on top of the mage.

“That wasn’t even fair!” Beldam cackled, half sorry it was over so quickly. She hadn’t even been able to give the mage a taste of her ice. But then her sisters glanced over with tense, worried expressions, and she remembered herself. She turned and felt the blood drain from her face.

Cerin was staring at her, which wasn’t really a shock, as she was the closest to them. As unsettling as she had found their blank eyes, she suddenly found herself missing them, as now, within the void of each pupil, there was a tiny pinprick of white in the center.

A million thoughts swarmed her at once—the black magic had truly taken them over now, it was too late, they might as well be dead—and she froze. The shadows that spilled out in front of them were moving slower and less erratically. Like water freezing, she recognized as they condensed. Out of the darkness, like a puppet being yanked by strings, rose a hand shape. Five fingers, much larger than anything she’d seen them summon before. It was mostly purple, but something was swirling within it—wisps of black, yet splashes of color, like glitter, like stars.

Only the rain reminded her that she was not again in the Shadow Queen’s tomb.

The hand vanished, but she turned around to face the mage again and it reappeared hovering over them—Marilyn and Vivian darted away. The hand reached down and scooped up the mage, trapping them between its fingers, and sank back down into the shadows with them in tow.

“What are you _doing?!”_ Beldam demanded as soon as her voice allowed it, whipping around and jabbing a finger in Cerin’s direction. “You told me I’m just like her, and then you pull _this?!”_

Cerin hadn’t once taken their eyes off her, but they didn’t react to her words. Until they drew themself up straighter, and opened their mouth and spoke. But what came out were not words Beldam understood—they had a cadence, it was clearly some kind of language, but not one she’d ever heard before. And their voice was lower than usual, velvety, calmer than they had any right to be.

“Why are you speaking in tongues!?” Beldam shrieked, her temper and panic colliding. “You are not allowed to let yourself drown in this madness, do you hear me? You’re going to fight tooth and nail for every miserable inch, just like I did!”

There was movement behind her, and she felt Marilyn’s hand on her shoulder, her fingers tightening warningly. As tempted as she was to ignore her, another look at Cerin’s eyes and the expanding whiteness made her lose her words, and she fell silent.

Now Vivian crept forward, and Cerin turned on her, the shadows halting for just a moment before convulsing twice as hard. She was shaking, Beldam could tell even from this distance. Yet she stood alone, defiant, her trembling hands balling into fists.

“Y-you have to give them back,” she stammered into the rain. “The—the mage…I know they tried to hurt you, but you can’t just—it’s not like you to leave them for dead!”

“Give it up, Vivian.” Beldam pulled away from Marilyn, shaking her head. “There’s no appealing to their better nature anymore. They’re gone.”

“You don’t know that!” Vivian twisted to face her, baring her teeth. Beldam instinctively stepped back, her heart leaping into her throat. The last time she’d seen Vivian this distressed, it had ended poorly.

Marilyn elbowed Beldam and pointed to the forest beyond, over Vivian’s shoulder. Beldam squinted into the shadows, seeing nothing. But then, something dark coalesced above the ground, like a void had been ripped in time and space itself. It hovered, shuddering, pulsating at the edges. Then something dropped out of it with a thud, a flash of red. The dark mass ebbed away, fragmenting into smaller and smaller pieces until there was nothing left, but the red mage remained, facedown and unmoving.

Something white scurried through the surrounding undergrowth—their old friend the white mage. Beldam had half wondered where they’d gone off to…wary of the sirens watching them, they lunged forward and snatched the red mage by their cloak, and dragged them away into the safety of the bushes.

“You…you did it.” Vivian seemed just as stunned as her sisters at first, but she recovered, turning back to Cerin with her hands clasped together. “You did it! I knew it’s still you in there!”

The motion was barely perceptible, but Beldam swore Cerin tilted their head a fraction of an inch. Then they blinked, once, twice, three times, as if something in their eyes was paining them—“Move!” Beldam shouted too late.

With a snarl, Cerin covered their face with a hand. Simultaneously, the rippling shadows at their base shot out with a speed rivaling Marilyn’s notorious lightning bolts. They hit Vivian so hard she tumbled, somersaulting, thankfully coming to a skidding halt right before she split her head open on the trunk of a tree. She didn’t even have the chance to scream.

Marilyn was gone in an instant, warping through the shadows to tend to her fallen sister, leaving Beldam alone in front of the addled siren. She was the only thing standing between them and her family…facing Cerin made her mouth go dry, but she did anyway.

“Look what you’ve done!” She approached despite her heart threatening to burst. “She trusted you. She chose to see the best in you, and you hurt her. I thought you loved her.”

Cerin snapped something—maybe there were words in that language Beldam didn’t understand, or maybe it was just a shout—and they raised one hand. The shadows surged, and Beldam’s magic jumped to life without her conscious control. Blasts of frigid air broke from her palms, freezing the darkness where it stood. She recognized the shapes of mindlessly groping fingers, reaching out for her. As the ice that encased them shattered, they, too, melted away into nothing.

In front of her, Cerin was cowering, their breathing ragged, their own fingers twisted in their hair. She swallowed hard but stepped forward.

“It doesn’t have to be this way.” The shadows to her right shuddered, and she lifted a hand and froze them solid before they could touch her. Her pulse roared in her ears. “You have a choice here. Accept as a part of you whatever it is that’s been causing you so much grief…or become what you see now.”

They slung more garbled speech her way, and the shadows loomed closer, towering over her. She had just enough time to brace herself as they crashed. They bit into her skin, wrapped themselves around her throat. Ice seeped from her fingertips as she clawed at the darkness, a scream fighting through her constricted airway. Then the pressure vanished, and she fell forward, hitting the sodden ground with a gasp.

The phantom feeling of fingers still tight around her neck made her cough, but she risked a glance upward from where she knelt, and saw the flailing darkness close in around her. The cloud of black made Cerin vanish from her sight.

Their errant magic made her skin crawl—literally, it felt like there were thousands of fingers running up and down her body. She covered her face with her arms, the shadows tugging at her in every direction, though not quite hard enough to hurt. Trying to veil herself just made the magic shoot up her tether. It was hard to breathe, and all outside noise was muted and distant. Was this what it was like to drown?

She summoned her strength, ice collecting on her fingertips. The shadows buffeted her, bruising her and tearing her skin, but she ignored them. She’d done this once before, what felt like lifetimes ago. She could do it again. Her fists closed around the solid ice they formed.

She broke from her defensive position, plunging the icicle straight into the shadows in front of her. With a noise much like a hiss, they receded, moonlight and rain pouring in from above once more. She wasted no time, darting forward. Cerin’s protective barrier of darkness was as thin and transparent as smoke, and provided no resistance as she ripped through it, crashing into them. They stumbled. She snatched them by the throat. The cold of the icicle numbed her other hand as she pulled it back to aim.

Those few seconds of hesitation felt like an eon. The rest of the world melted away, leaving her in a soundless void. Nothing existed but her weapon and the target. She saw their eyes—still dilated, still blank, if widened with surprise. Or fear. The last time she’d tried to stab a siren in the eye, she’d miscalculated and it backfired horribly. She envisioned the long, white scar running down the jawline. That wouldn’t do. It needed to be clean.

Her own eyes drifted downward, to the chest, to the throbbing white center that seemed to expand even as she stared at it. Also a no-go, there was no way she’d be able to maneuver around the ribs and sternum to pierce the heart. Maybe there was a happy medium…the whiteness of her own fingers caught her attention, the pulse beating beneath them. Incapacitate, then go in for the kill.

But before she could tighten her hold around the windpipe, fingers that did not belong to her were on top of hers, resting, not even trying to pry her loose. They were warm. The shock was nearly enough to make her drop the icicle.

Something convulsed underneath her hand, and they spoke, a frail wheeze that would have been lost to the wind if Beldam had been cognizant of anything else. “Is this how it ends?”

“You tell me.” The words jumped to her lips without her thinking about it. She wrested her gaze away from their throat to their face, watching as their eyes closed.

When they opened again, they were purple.

“I won’t give you the satisfaction.”

Their eyes rolled into the back of their head and they went limp. Startled, she released their throat, and they fell to the ground with a thump. The rippling shadows around both sirens followed their creator; they, too, collapsed into nothing.

It took another moment or two, but time began to pass again. How ironic it was that she was frozen to the spot. The rain was splattering against her skin, but she couldn’t feel anything except her heart pounding with such violence it almost hurt. She didn’t move, she couldn’t, until she felt the presence of another behind her. A much bigger hand than hers prized her fingers from the icicle and dropped it, where it broke in two. On her other side, a slow-moving pink and purple shadow crept toward the young siren’s body. Two gloved fingers pressed into their neck, right underneath their jaw.

“Alive,” Vivian said, twisting around to face her sisters. Feeling began to come back to Beldam’s extremities, and she remembered to breathe again. The same airy lightheadedness from before returned, but Marilyn moved away, so Beldam stood on her own and watched her lean down to scoop up the unconscious siren.

Vivian’s hair was frizzy and her body streaked with mud, and Beldam could tell she probably had a wicked headache by the way she clutched her head, but she had never seen her younger sister look so collected as she signed, “Home.” Marilyn disappeared with Cerin in tow.

Beldam met Vivian’s eyes, her mind going blank for a moment. “Are…are you all right?” she asked, her mind’s eye replaying in vivid detail the way Cerin’s magic had swatted her. She could be concussed, or worse.

“I’ve been better.” Vivian gave her a reserved, wry kind of smile that was out of place on her lips. “You know where to find us.”

She, too, sank into the shadows beneath her, leaving Beldam alone with the rain.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we're at the final stretch, wanted to get this chapter out of the way before i busy myself with the various things i'm doing this summer

Beldam’s hope that the rain would stop proved to be nothing but wishful thinking. If anything, it poured down heavier as she made her way back home. Too mentally rattled to warp through the shadows, she fought her way through the thick twilit forest, past the steeple, avoiding the trail.

Her wreck of a house somehow got even more pathetic in her absence, but it did provide a brief respite from the rain. She concealed herself in the overhang, catching her breath, beginning a clumsy attempt to process all that had happened.

But it didn’t last long. The kid’s abandoned corner was lifeless, distractingly so. It was like a giant chasm, an emptiness that was impossible for her to ignore even if she closed her eyes. Cerin’s hat lay forgotten on the soggy ground, its white stripes far too reminiscent of the damage done by the white magic for Beldam’s comfort. She could hardly stand to look at it…her mind was made up. She rose, approaching the corner with a distinct feeling like she was trespassing, and picked up the hat. Then she began her trek through the twilit woodland.

The trail was empty, devoid of wildlife. Perhaps all the flora and fauna were hiding from the rain. Absent, too, was the guard stationed at the gate of Twilight Town, leaving it closed and locked. As odd as she found this, she couldn’t bring herself to be disappointed. She sank into the shadows, appearing mere feet away on the other side of the fence.

The whole place was a ghost town—even the crows were gone from their usual perches in the bony branches of the trees. But most of the houses she passed were lit up from the inside, light spilling out of their windows and creating patches on the ground for her to avoid. She hadn’t thought the Twilighters were this hydrophobic…but it did mean fewer witnesses to her walk of shame, so she wasn’t inclined to complain.

She knew where her sisters had been living this whole time, of course. But she knew just as well that she wasn’t welcome. As she approached the house, its exterior made of the same dark brown wood as all the other buildings, the memories of the last time she’d been here unfolded without her permission.

The shambling corpses, dribbling with black magic so concentrated it took liquid form, broke into her sisters’ home in the early morning, when no one would see them. They took Vivian, silencing her with some chemical concoction carried over from their former lives as X-Naut PhDs. Beldam had orchestrated it all, controlling their every movement from a careful distance—she knew her younger sister would interfere if left alone, so she had to go. Marilyn was lucky she hadn’t been present, and the kid was lucky Beldam hadn’t known they existed, or she would have done the same to them both.

She’d meant to take Vivian to the deserted X-Naut fortress, where she’d be out of the way, but as she’d walked her undead minions through the sewers toward the teleporter, the black magic had revolted. Or, rather, now she knew the white magic began to fight back—either way, she lost control of them, and they fell apart. Her first mistake had been counting on literal cadavers, she supposed. The war the ancient magic waged inside her had left her frazzled, so she’d fled, leaving Vivian behind.

There was a degree of separation between herself and these memories…she recalled them all as if they belonged to someone else, as if she were watching them through clouded glass. But it was her who had done all those things, it was her with the atrocities on her hands…even though the magic had changed her, she knew it had. It whispered to her, made her disregard risks, promised her it would all be worth it in the end. Even now, she couldn’t quite draw the line where its influence ended and where her own autonomy began.

It took her a moment to realize she’d been standing at the front door, staring at the grains in the wood, as the rain soaked her to the bone. She lifted a hand and knocked. No answer, so she slipped inside.

The first thing she noticed was how warm the house was, especially after she’d been in the rain for so long. Being an ice siren, she had low tolerance for heat, but there was something pleasant about this warmth—not too overpowering, even by her standards. The lights were dim, if substantially stronger than the moonlight by which she’d grown used to navigating. Seated at the table almost right in front of her was Marilyn, who had both elbows on the table and her chin in her hands. Her eyes were unfocused until Beldam’s movement made her snap to attention, and raise a questioning eyebrow.

“Delivery,” Beldam signed, indicating Cerin’s hat. She’d completely forgotten about it, and now it was damp with rain. Something like guilt stirred in the back of her mind as she looked at it.

“They’re asleep in their room,” Marilyn replied. “Don’t wake them.”

“Asleep?” Beldam repeated. “I thought they were unconscious.”

“They came to when I brought them here. They said something to me and passed out again.”

That made sense, Beldam supposed. She’d healed from the damage the magic had caused her while asleep, as well. “What did they say?”

“How should I know?” Marilyn touched her cheek below her temple and then again, near her mouth, accompanied by a withering look.

Beldam winced, closing her hand and running it in a circle along her chest. “Sorry.”

Marilyn rolled her eyes, but she seemed more exasperated than legitimately pissed off. She signed, “Vivian has a hell of a migraine, so I’m leaving her alone. I suggest you do the same.”

Antagonizing Vivian hadn’t been part of Beldam’s plan for the moment, but she appreciated the warning anyway. She slipped past Marilyn into the house’s back hallway. She reasoned that the closed door at one of its ends was a bedroom, and presumably so was the one on the opposite end, except it was open a crack. The third, almost right in front of her, was wide open and clearly the bathroom. Seeing it gave Beldam pause. Running water was a luxury she’d long lived without.

She pushed open the door that was slightly ajar and knew immediately it was not Vivian’s. It was dark save for a sliver of moonlight spilling through a gap between the heavy curtains on the singular window. It was also fairly barren furniture-wise, only containing a bed with an accompanying nightstand and a small desk on the other end of the room, piled with stuff she couldn’t quite identify. An unmoving lump beneath the blankets on the bed was the only sign of life. Posters lined the walls, none of which depicted anything Beldam was familiar with, though the one nearest her reading, “Fall Out Boo: Live in Sarasaland” made her wonder if they were all music related. She wouldn’t have bothered keeping up with stuff like that even if she could.

Something on the nightstand was blinking intermittently. It took her a moment to notice at first, but now that she kept seeing the flashing light out of the corner of her eye, it was driving her crazy. She leaned over, finding that the source of the light was some silver square-shaped device that she’d seen before, and saw more and more often in the hands of other people. She swore it was like a disease, the way these things spread.

She picked it up, putting Cerin’s hat in its place on the nightstand, and flipped it open. The resulting brightness nearly made her hiss aloud, but when her eyes adjusted she knitted her brows at all the kid’s notifications. Seven unread messages from one “Tank,” and a handful of others. She wasn’t very technology-savvy, why would she be, but she fought with it anyway, because every time she closed the thing again the light kept flashing. And somehow, instead of clearing the notifications away, she ended up unlocking it, and she was greeted with a different screen, covered with tiny icons.

What idiot wouldn’t set a password on something like this? Cerin was either very brave or very stupid, perhaps a deadly combination of both. She wasn’t here to snoop, though, she knew from prior experience that if she rooted through someone’s correspondence, she was bound to see things she didn’t want to see. But the background of the screen caught her attention, and she looked past the application icons to see it.

It was her sisters, she realized. A picture of them, and Cerin too, seated at a table in some brightly-lit place that was clearly nowhere near Twilight Town. An orange Yoshi with a tuft of blue hair that struck Beldam as familiar had slung an arm across Cerin’s shoulders, his head so close to Cerin’s that their hat was knocked askew. All four were beaming. Beldam stared, tracing the lines in her sisters’ smiles with her eyes. It all looked so…genuine.

Someone cleared their throat. Beldam jumped a mile, whipping around to the doorway to find Marilyn standing there, her arms crossed. Beldam snapped the device closed and put it back with a quickness as if it had burned her, offering Marilyn a nervous smile.

She followed her younger sister back out into the front room, where there was enough light to see each other signing. “You had one job,” Marilyn said, her eyes narrowed. “And digging through their stuff was not part of it. Can you go two seconds without meddling in someone else’s business?”

“That wasn’t my intention,” Beldam began, but Marilyn ignored her. “If you stopped treating people like tools, maybe they’d be more inclined to forgive you when you ask for it,” she signed with a scowl.

Beldam bristled, but as much as she wanted to defend herself, that picture seemed to have replaced the part of her brain responsible for her words. When was the last time she’d seen either of her sisters with such unreserved, unforced grins? She stared at her hands, turning them over slowly. The glove on her left hand was stained nearly beyond recognition and wearing thin at the fingertips. Her right hand was bare; the transformation that had enlarged and corrupted it had shredded her glove months ago, but the whiteness of her skin imitated it anyway. At a glance, it looked like the white magic was still there, eating away at her very body. A reminder.

She looked up, sensing Marilyn’s increasing agitation at her refusal to answer. “I’m sorry,” she said again. Marilyn met her apology with a skeptical huff and turned away. It stung.

She looked around, burdened with the sudden urge to make herself useful. She didn’t have any place being here now, she and Marilyn both knew it, but she didn’t want to return to her isolation in the rain-drowned ruins of the house. But her sisters’ home was unexpectedly clean and hardly anything looked out of place, despite Vivian’s tendency to be clumsy and scatterbrained—or maybe because of it. Either way, she was at a loss of things to do, and she could feel Marilyn’s eyes on her.

She turned to her sister, trying to find the words to explain herself and then translate them into signs, except she had no hope of even doing the former. Marilyn watched her struggle for a few moments before she rescued her by saying, “You want to stay.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” Beldam admitted, revolted at how bashfully she did so. Like she was some child being scolded.

“We don’t have room.” Marilyn indicated the back hallway as if it would illustrate her point. “There’s barely enough for the three of us.”

“I don’t mean permanently,” Beldam said. Marilyn looked at her expectantly, and she faltered. She had no idea what she did mean.

She tried again. “Our old house is miserable, especially with the rain. Can you blame me for not wanting to stay there any longer?”

Marilyn regarded her coolly. She didn’t need to sign to voice her question: _What’s your point?_

“Damn it,” Beldam muttered out loud, pinching the bridge of her nose. She didn’t know why she’d even thought she could get away with being coy. “I have nowhere to go and nothing to do. I know you don’t want me here, but how can I begin to fix things if I’m never around those I’ve wronged?”

“You could start by not immediately betraying what little trust I put in you.” Marilyn looked thoroughly unamused now, a look Beldam had seen on her face very often in the past. “Are you asking for yet another chance?”

The part of Beldam that craved all control over every situation was spitting venom, but the part of her that felt genuine remorse was nudging her in the right direction. She nodded, quashing her buried disgust at her compliance.

“You’re a fucking idiot.” Marilyn again rolled her eyes. “But you did somehow manage to deescalate that whole situation without anyone dying, so I suppose I can grant you this for now. Don’t mess it up.” She held her sister’s gaze for a moment before cracking her neck, making Beldam shudder.

“I’m turning in, too. I don’t care what you do with yourself as long as you’re not hurting someone.” She offered her older sister a parting shrug before slipping into the back hallway and vanishing behind the wall. Beldam watched her go, surprised to find that she felt nothing but relief. Marilyn was okay, and didn’t seem to hate her. It was a miracle.

And now that she’d essentially been given free reign…she still didn’t know what to do. Not having a goal was an alien feeling, one that made her feel off-balance. She absently pulled a thread from her tattered glove, and then stared at it. There was an idea that would easily eat away a few hours.

Her sisters must have the proper materials somewhere—one of them had to have made Cerin the proper Shadow Siren attire after they were taken in, they weren’t formed wearing it. Casualties in terms of clothing happened with enough frequency over the sisters’ centuries of life that they’d eventually just amassed a stockpile of extra fabric. Beldam rooted around in the cabinets and closets, even risking bodily harm by sneaking into Marilyn and Vivian’s room and searching there. Luckily she found a swath of white cloth, exactly what she was looking for, and escaped unnoticed back into the front room.

She’d made enough of these stupid things over the years that she didn’t need a pattern. It was mind-numbing work, all the cutting and sewing and half-assed measuring, but being able to turn off her thoughts for the first time in so very, very long was an incredible blessing. She was barely aware of anything except the rain drumming against the windows, and was only broken out of this trance when she noticed a shadow standing in the doorway and almost had a heart attack.

“Don’t do that!” she snapped, grimacing as the needle began to ice over and dropping it on the table in disgust. “Stars, who taught you to creep around like some—some possessed marionette?”

“You did, sis.” Vivian’s voice had that slow, languid tone to it that it always did when she first woke up, but even through it her amusement was clear. “Sneaking around undetected is what we _do,_ remember?”

 “Shut up.” Beldam shot her a glare as she picked up the needle again, now that the frost had melted. Vivian smiled in return and rummaged through the kitchen, making Beldam remember she hadn’t eaten in…she had no idea. A millennium, maybe.

“You’re feeling better, then?” she asked to keep her mind off the embarrassing prospect of asking her sister for handouts.

“I guess. I’m a little bruised still, but…” She shrugged, and turned to the wall behind her. On the other side of it was Cerin’s room. “I’m more worried about them.”

“They’ll be fine,” Beldam said flatly. She hadn’t meant to sound so dismissive, but then again, she did have something of an appearance to keep up. If she were to suddenly be all sunshine and rainbows, at the very least she’d give both her sisters whiplash. “If their recovery process is anything like mine was, they’re having the best sleep of their life right now.”

Vivian murmured something noncommittal as Beldam admired her handiwork—a brand new pair of gloves, free of holes and stains and loose threads. She slipped them on and was unable to resist smiling at the feeling like she was whole again, the last piece of the puzzle finally returned to its rightful place. Back in the day, there were rumors that sirens needed to wear the gloves to help their bodies maintain their shape. Beldam had always been skeptical of this claim, but she wasn’t very eager to test the theory so soon after her arm had finally returned to normal. She’d grown very tired of her right hand always being colder than her left, anyway.

“Did Marilyn say you could use that stuff?”

She glanced up at Vivian’s question. “Um…implicitly. Why, do you want it back?” She offered her gloved hand and Vivian rolled her eyes.

“Just checking. We’re hosting you, and I’ve watched you steal enough things from people naïve enough to host us to doubt that you’ve grown out of it.”

Beldam didn’t want to admit it, but her logic was sound. Still, she couldn’t resist sounding indignant as she said, “You really think I’d steal from my own sisters?”

“Yes.” Vivian’s response was immediate and colorless. Beldam blinked. That little voice in the back of her mind that she’d spent centuries drowning out was back in full force. With its bellowing came the creeping claws of guilt.

“Well, I’m…I’m not. I swear it.” She was suddenly struck with the urge to bash herself over the head with something, the heavier the better. Vivian didn’t even glance her direction, which only intensified this feeling.

“But there…there is something I want of you. Of anyone who’s available, really.” The humiliation made her feel like she were about to catch fire, combust completely here in this chair and burn until there was nothing left, but at least now Vivian turned to face her, even if she looked skeptical.

“There is no place here for me, that much is obvious. But the only place I do have is…you saw it. It’s pathetic. And I’m finding myself beginning to care about how much of an embarrassing wreck it is now that I’m reasonably sure I won’t die tomorrow.”

Vivian’s expression hadn’t changed at all. This silence, this…stoicism was unlike her, and Beldam wondered if she were digging her own grave. Not that it kept her from blustering onward. “I want to fix it up. At the very least, rebuild the walls and the roof. And you know if I could, I’d do it myself, but…” She flexed her right bicep, demonstrating her nonexistent musculature, and Vivian’s lips twitched. “I’ll need all the help I can get. So…that’s what I’m asking.”

“I could have gone without the preamble, Beldam.” Again, Vivian sounded amused, and Beldam ultimately decided the blow to her pride was preferable to Vivian setting her alight, literally or otherwise. “I…don’t see why you’re asking me about this, Marilyn’s the one who’s most suited to heavy lifting.”

“Marilyn has also made it clear that I won’t be able to get away with anything,” Beldam muttered. “She’d never agree to this without your approval as a prerequisite. If I were to suggest it to her alone, she’d deck me.”

Vivian giggled, and Beldam refrained from telling her she wasn’t joking.

“But if you were to agree to it as well, it’s that much more likely that she’ll acquiesce. So.” Beldam made eye contact with her youngest sister, who stared straight back at her. Oh no. Was she actually going to…?

“Yes?” Vivian gave her an innocent smile. Beldam scowled. This faux-ingenuousness was a staple of the signature Shadow Siren charm that had always managed to evade Beldam’s grasp. Yet more evidence pointing to Vivian being the best specimen of the seventh generation, she supposed.

“You know what I mean, damn it,” she muttered, glancing at the table as her cheeks burned. “Don’t play dumb.”

“I want to hear you say it.” Vivian’s grin was audible, and Beldam boiled. “And you better sell it, too.”

Beldam’s ego would never recover. Though that was half the reason she was in this mess to begin with… “Please,” she said, trying not to grind the word between her teeth.

Vivian hummed as if she were deep in thought. “Not bad for a first try. I _suppose_ I can find the time to help you, dear sister.”

Beldam was still bristling from being teased, but Vivian’s words eventually sank in, and her bad temper fell apart. “You…you mean it?”

“Yeah,” Vivian said nonchalantly, busying herself with something on the stove. “I try not to say things I don’t mean.”

 _That makes one of us._ Still, not even her guilty conscience put much of a damper on her mood. She’d never imagined she’d get this far…she was going to have a house again. A real one, with four walls and a roof. Not the scavenged remains of something no one else wanted, but someplace that was truly hers. It would be almost just like before all this nonsense with the damned Shadow Queen. The hope that flared inside her chest was elating.

She didn’t even realize she’d been beaming until she noticed Vivian watching her with interest. “I haven’t seen you this happy since you convinced Grodus to take us on.”

“Oh, don’t say that idiot’s name to me,” Beldam groaned, shaking her head in exaggerated disgust. “If I had known how much of a hassle that all would prove to be…never again.”

She slid out of the chair and entered the kitchen, watching Vivian continue to rifle through cabinets as a pot sat on the stove. “What are you making?”

“Finishing off this box of pasta. Marilyn’s gonna be ravenous when she gets up…Cerin, too.” At the mention of the kid, she turned to the wall again. “You’re sure they’ll be okay?”

“Reasonably.” Beldam shuffled around, wondering if she could do something to help without having to ask to be put to work. “I make no promises, because even I don’t know how or why it happened for me, but…the disease isn’t just physical. It’s very much influenced by your mental state…gets worse the more negative you are. It’s difficult to break that cycle.” She risked a glance up to see Vivian nodding solemnly. “But being open about it, especially to yourself…I think that’s what saved me. They must have managed it as well.” They better have.

“What exactly did you do?” Vivian asked, now idly stirring the pot as it bubbled. “I didn’t see anything that happened after they…after I was hit. I thought I saw the shadows take you down, too, but…clearly not. Next thing I knew, they were unconscious…”

 _Oh, you know, I choked them out and was entirely prepared to kill them._ The reminder of what she’d come so close to doing make her stiffen. Being honest would just get her in trouble, as it often did. She didn’t want to be on the receiving end of an incensed fire siren with a boiling pot of water. She’d just tell one of her famous half-truths. “Again, I don’t know for sure, but…I tried to talk them out of it. I think that helped, somehow.”

Vivian hummed again, noncommittal but interested. None the wiser. Beldam breathed easily again. She didn’t intend to keep that from her forever, just…she would wait a short while. Until the kid was up and running, at least. Hell, they probably remembered exactly what she did to them. That was going to be a fun conversation. She sighed, heavily enough that Vivian turned to give her a questioning glance.

“All of this ‘making an effort to be moral’ bullshit better be worth it,” she muttered before her common sense could stop her.

“Even if it’s not, isn’t it better than being punished, and knowing you deserve it?”

Beldam ran her fingers over the white crawling up her arm. Just as warm to the touch as the rest of her skin, just as smooth. “I suppose.”

“Hand me the strainer? It’s in the cabinet to your left.”

At least she was trusted with this much. She dug around in the cabinet in question, quietly wondering how her sisters had managed to accumulate all this _stuff._ They traveled light, as a rule, or so she thought…she would have never imagined any of them settling down so comfortably like this. She passed the strainer off and backed away, leaning against the counter with her arms crossed. The rain outside sounded like it was slowing, the persistent tapping on the windows dying off.

She flexed the fingers of her right hand again, as if unconvinced they were real. At any moment, she could wake up in the forest again, still infected, still alone. The universe was hellbent on ripping any and all happiness from her, after all. She squeezed her eyes shut, counting the seconds, her heartbeats. Then she jerked her head up, her eyes flying open.

Nothing happened. The rain still pattered, the lights were still dim and the air still warm, Vivian was still nearby, humming to herself. It was real.

She settled against the counter again, turning her face away from Vivian to smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> explaining the joke: the unnamed sign marilyn gives beldam literally means "deaf", contextually meaning "i'm deaf [you idiot]." also the sign beldam gives in response really does mean "sorry"
> 
> i apologize for the f bomb but i do not apologize for fall out boo i have been sitting on that pun for YEARS


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy pride month i'm wrapping this shit UP
> 
> so yeah this marks the end of this series but not the end of the verse. it's harder than you'd think to drop a creative project you've been working on for years. so i have a short story i'm super proud of that was intended to be a oneshot and massively spiraled out of hand as they tend to do, gonna post that eventually. i'm also rewriting 998 cause oh god i hate it the way it is. don't really have an update schedule for that, it happens as it happens, though i've already finished the first chapter and will update it soon. see the notes on the first chapter of that fic for more info.
> 
> i'm sure y'all know this by now but my tumblr is the best way to get in contact with me in case you wanted to tell me how great i am or to kill myself. hyenaklaws.tumblr.com
> 
> thanks for sticking with me this far!

Cerin awoke in their own bed with the feeling like they’d been in a coma for a hundred years.

It was impossible to tell how much time had passed. They sat up and looked around the room. They were embedded in their usual tangle of sheets and blankets that were sliding off the mattress and onto the floor. Their room was dark, or as dark as it could be with the moon glaring straight inside the window. Nothing looked out of place…nothing felt out of place, either. They’d actually never felt more rested and energized…that in itself was alarming.

They twisted to face the nightstand, seeing the blinking light of their Mailbox SP, which lit up the contrasting stripes of their hat beside it. Their hat…they could have sworn they left it somewhere, but they couldn’t remember anything more than that…they groped for the device and flipped it open, grimacing at the screen’s light. It was hideously early in the morning, hours before they would normally even consider getting up. There was a flood of unread texts, from either Tank or their clients. _Oh shit._

They opened Tank’s first, hoping it would jog their memory. The last text he sent was almost a full forty-eight hours ago—“oh god you are okay right please tell me you’re okay”. Their guts twisted—still they couldn’t remember. They scrolled up to the last one they sent him and read down: “hey man i’m real sorry about yesterday, i promise i’ll make it up to you” “oh come on dude don’t give me the cold shoulder, i know i pissed you off but really” “you’re not even opening these you jackass. damn” “cerin cmon this isn’t funny, just send me a k or something so i know you’re not like dead in a ditch somewhere” “DUDE” “oh shit you’re sick or something aren’t you i knew you were acting weird”

Tank’s concern was touching, in a weird way, even amidst Cerin’s own wild confusion. But their memory was still so fuzzy…they’d seen Tank recently, they knew it, but couldn’t remember a date or time. The more they picked apart their mind, the more they felt like they had plummeted into murky water.

He would probably lose his mind if they left him on read, so they typed out a reply. “I’m alive I promise, something happened but I’m fine now I think”

They’d answer their clients later, when they weren’t so disoriented. They snapped the device closed and put it back on the nightstand, squeezing their eyes shut. Everything felt so _normal_ even though it clearly was not.

They just so happened to glance down, saw the white diagonal in their chest, the lighter shade visible on their dark skin even through the dimness, and almost screamed.

Beldam, the dilapidated house, their self-inflicted exile, the mage…it all came flooding back, and they clutched at their scar as they tried to make sense of it. They couldn’t remember with full clarity what had happened after Beldam had left them alone at the steeple, but the pain they’d suffered then was fresh in their mind, phantom aching radiating out from their wound with the regularity of a ticking clock. The more they tried to clear this haze, the more the ghostly pain intensified, but their emotions filled in the gaps where their memory failed. Panic and hatred in equal measure, blinding fury clashing with abject terror. Their magic had slipped their control entirely, and the more they’d tried to reign it in, the more they’d sunken into this mire they recalled.

Shuddering, they fished their tail out of the tornado of sheets and connected it to the floorboards below. They concentrated, and the shadow they cast on the floor came to life, a hand stretching out of it slowly and deliberately. It reached for the blankets that were losing their fight against gravity and tugged them back onto the bed, then dissipated without putting up a struggle. Cerin breathed, running their fingers along the raised white scar on their chest. Their powers weren’t tugging at their mind, weren’t fighting them for control anymore—they’d never again take it for granted.

They left their room behind, crept down the silent hall and into the front room, bathed in the bluish and flickering light of the TV. As always, the sound was off and the subtitles were on. Marilyn was known to pass out on the couch sometimes, but Cerin didn’t see her in her usual spot, slumped against one of the arms. They rounded the corner of the couch to find another shadowy shape in her place.

It was Beldam, splayed out like she’d been tossed there from a great distance, groping for the remote two inches out of her reach. She turned her head slightly toward Cerin as they moved in her peripheral, then returned her gaze to the screen. Then she did a double take.

“Cerin! You’re alive!” She flung herself off the couch and thoroughly invaded Cerin’s personal space, inspecting their scar from an inch away. They backed away so quickly they slammed against the wall.

“You’re looking perfectly healed, too. Just as I expected.” She stepped back, allowing Cerin the space to breathe again. They focused less on her words than they did her right arm—white as bone up to her elbow. But other than its color, it was exactly the same as her other one, she was even wearing the usual gloves. Looking at it made them want to shrink away from her for some reason.

“How do you feel?” she asked, still eyeing them with guarded curiosity. Their skin prickled, and their scar began to itch.

“Fine, I guess.” They scratched at it, trying not to wilt under her stare.

She shot a glance over their shoulder, at the doorway, before leaning in closer and whispering, “How much do you remember?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” This conspiratorial tone she was using didn’t sit right with them at all, and combined with the sudden frantic beating of their heart…they crossed their arms, trying not to show their nerves. They felt like they were on the precipice of remembering something important, dragging it out of the clouded gloom that thinned the more thought they gave it.

She relaxed a little, not that they found themself any more at ease. “Well. If you can’t remember…it’s best left unsaid.”

“What?” Already eroded by their own anxiety, their patience snapped. An idea was coming to them…no, a memory. Something their recovery process had buried. “What did you do to me?!”

Beldam cringed. Actually flinched, like the accusation had hurt her. “Keep it down, for the stars’ sake, _please,”_ she hissed, casting another wary gaze to the doorway. “I can explain—”

“You better,” Cerin snapped. Beldam’s white arm had an unearthly glow in the light of the TV, and they imagined— _remembered_ —those fingers around their throat. Not tight enough to cut off their breathing, or even prevent them from speaking, but enough that they felt the pressure even now. They remembered the gleaming point of the icicle, shimmering in the moonlight, aimed at their face. The disease that had so consumed them, warped them into this monster they barely remembered being, had receded just enough at that moment to let them realize they were going to die at her hand.

Beldam watched their dawning realization with clear apprehension, a crooked smile contorting her lips.

“You remember now, don’t you?” she said, an insincere chuckle escaping her like the hiss of a snake.

The room seemed colder than before. Cerin tightened their arms across their chest, not trusting themself to speak. Beldam’s eyes were hidden, but they could tell she was doing everything to avoid looking at them.

“I…look, I’m sorry for what I did. Tried to do. It’s just…I was at a loss. Everything was spinning out of control, and…I was afraid. Do you remember what you did to Vivian?”

The mere implication that Cerin had caused her harm made them want to be sick. Yet, at Beldam’s words, the shroud surrounding another memory fell away. Their powers had acted out and hit something. The guilt, the regret, the fury were immediate and all-consuming, even if they hadn’t understood why.

“Is she okay?” they asked, hating the note of desperation their voice hit.

“She’s fine, kid. She’s had plenty worse.” Beldam gave them a less uneasy smile that didn’t last very long. “But I didn’t know that when it happened. For all I knew, she could’ve been seriously hurt. You took her out without even trying—you channeled the damned Shadow Queen herself when you did that _thing_ with the red mage. You were…dangerous. And trying to talk you down did nothing.”

Cerin was only vaguely familiar with the things Beldam mentioned. Like they weren’t really there themself, like Beldam had explained it previously and they hadn’t been paying attention. But her story aligned with what little they could recall on their own. They’d made a stand against the red mage, just wanted the intruder _gone._ And their powers fed off this desire and handled the rest without Cerin’s input.

Vivian had intervened, though, they remembered that. There was no forgetting the way they ached when her voice rang out through the trees, begging them to fix what they’d done. So they did their best, retrieved the red mage from whatever abyss they’d been dropped into. For one second, the clouds had parted, and they knew who they were. Until the magic dragged them back down again.

Beldam watched them with an expression that, on anyone else, Cerin would have called concern. “I’m sorry. If there had been any other way to bring you down, I would have done it. But there didn’t seem to be, and…you were going to hurt my family if I allowed it. I will not apologize for defending them.”

Cerin scratched absently at their scar. No, they really couldn’t find it within themself to blame her for, for once, acting rationally. They’d known they were a threat, that was why they quarantined themself with her in the first place.  All she did was…take the situation to its logical conclusion. It made their stomach turn, but they swallowed and said as evenly as they could manage, “I get it. I would have done the same in your place.”

“I don’t doubt that.” Beldam nodded, putting her hands behind her back. “I promise it was nothing personal…truthfully, I’m glad to see you’re better. You pulled yourself out of it just in time.”

Her word choice was deliberate, it must have been. They tilted their head. The madness had faded to the background when Beldam had her fingers around their throat, but they didn’t remember much beyond that. She nodded sagely, like she’d said something profound.

“That was all you, Rerun. You made the choice to be better, just like I did.” Beldam flashed them a grin. It was the first time they had ever seen her legitimately smile. “That kind of strength is admirable, coming from anyone.”

She wasn’t praising them, was she? There was no way. Cerin hoped their eyes were sufficiently covered that she wouldn’t see them narrow. “Uh…thanks.”

An awkward silence overtook the room, broken only by Marilyn’s snoring through the walls. Beldam suddenly became very interested in the carpet while Cerin resisted the urge to keep clawing at their scar.

“So now what?” they asked, trying to keep their mind busy so their fingers wouldn’t wander.

“A relative return to normalcy, I would imagine.”

“What’s normal for you?”

“That’s none of your business.” She glanced back up, pursing her lips a little. “If you must know…with the help of my sisters, we’re going to rebuild that old wreck so it’s livable again. I suppose I’ll be there until the next inevitable disaster rears its head.”

“You think you can fix that thing by yourselves?” Cerin hadn’t intended their skepticism to leak out of their tone, but it did, and Beldam scowled.

“What’s my alternative? It’s the only place I dare call my own. And as it is now, it’s hardly any better than living out in the woods like an animal. I quite enjoy having a roof over my head, thank you.”

“That roof’s not going anywhere without, like, actual construction equipment.” They paused, an idea brewing. “But, you know, I do happen to have connections to people who can make stuff happen…and powerful magic that can manipulate physical objects.”

“You better not be implying what I think you are.” Beldam crossed her arms.

“Why not? It’s for a good cause. You get a real home, one that’s close by so we can keep an eye on you.”

“For the stars’ sake, Rerun, haven’t you done enough for me?” She shook her head as if it would banish the idea. “I already owe you more than I could ever repay. My life itself, my relationship with my sisters, now my literal living space?”

“Good thing I’m not looking to be repaid.” Cerin gave a nonchalant shrug, not particularly surprised at Beldam’s reaction. “I have the ability to help, so I should. It’s the right thing to do.”

“Of course it is.” Beldam clicked her tongue against her teeth. “I’d expect nothing else from someone whose self-worth is rooted in their perceived usefulness to other people.”

Somehow, out of all the things she’d ever said to them, that was by far the most cutting. They floundered for a second too long before finally managing, “What are you talking about?”

Beldam gave a low, laugh-like huff. “You don’t remember our little heart-to-heart? Your constant self-sacrificing, in your mind, makes up for the fact that you ‘shouldn’t’ exist. You told me so. You’re not offering to help for my benefit, you’re doing it for your own peace of mind.”

A rebuttal had formed on Cerin’s tongue, where it seemed to stick no matter how they tried to force it through.

“What’s more, you routinely set yourself up so someone can take advantage of this complex of yours, and you know it. The disease exacerbated the feelings you least want to surface…my latent guilt, your latent resentment. It nearly killed us both. Have you learned nothing?”

Cerin’s entire vocabulary seeped out of their brain and into the shadows surrounding them. Beldam offered them a wry smile.

“Right, right, I’m supposed to be _honest_ about my intentions now. Look, like it or not, I’m in your debt. Let me help you out in some small part. We know your complex stems from self-esteem issues, which I may or may not have some experience with myself. If we can kill that at its source, then…maybe we can work you out of this helping-other-people-to-your-own-detriment thing.”

Cerin hesitated still, partially because their words were returning to them in a slow trickle. “Okay…how exactly are you going to do that?”

Beldam tossed her hands in the air. “Come on, kid, I’m doing the best I can! So deeply sorry that I haven’t yet worked out all the minutiae—are you going to let me help or not?”

She was trying so hard, Cerin felt like they should be suspicious. But they probably weren’t risking too much by allowing this, and agreeing would put her at ease… _this is exactly the kind of thing she’s talking about. Dammit._ Out loud, as they couldn’t resist ribbing her, they said, “It sounds to me like you just want someone to talk to. I’ll oblige.”

“See, you’re doing it again,” she said with a glare. “Acting like you’re doing me a favor. Cut it out.”

“I am doing you a favor, I’m building your house!”

“First of all, you haven’t done a damn thing yet, secondly, that wasn’t what I—"

“Can you keep it down, maybe?” a third voice came from the hall. Cerin turned to see Vivian, leaning against the doorway and rubbing her eyes. Her hair was a formidable tangle of pink, fluffy curls, and when her hand came away her scarlet eyes were glazed over, unfocused. They drifted from Cerin to Beldam, and she covered her mouth with her hand as she yawned.

She didn’t look hurt. Cerin finally relaxed, the relief that swept them immediate and addictive. They barely heard Beldam as she said, “Sorry. Thin walls.”

Vivian mumbled something in her half-asleep stupor and turned the corner, vanishing again. Beldam elbowed Cerin, holding up three fingers. Then two. One.

“Cerin!” Vivian burst back in, her eyes alight. “You’re okay!”

She embraced them, gently, as if afraid it would agitate them. But she was the one person ever allowed to touch them like this without warning, and they hugged her back without reservation. Only now, with her natural heat surrounding them and her hair tickling their face, were they sure things were okay.

She pulled away, and, noticing their chest for the first time, winced.

“It’s fine,” Cerin said quickly, tossing a glance at Beldam as if she would verify their health. “Doesn’t even hurt or anything.”

Beldam grunted an affirmative. “I told you they’d be fine, didn’t I?”

“Forgive me for being reluctant to trust you.” Vivian narrowed her eyes at her sister, but shrugged it off a moment later. “I’m just glad you’re safe…both of you. Let’s never have this happen again.”

Cerin shot Beldam a pointed look, and she jabbed them in the side with her elbow, muttering something under her breath that sounded like it included the word “juvenile.” Louder, she said, “Go back to bed, Vivian. I know you won’t be functional for another four hours yet.”

The excitement worn off, Vivian proved her right by stifling another yawn. “Not my fault you’re a morning person…good night, sis. And Cerin.” She offered them one last smile, warm as her fire, before turning the corner again. Her bedroom door clicked closed.

Cerin and Beldam exchanged glances, shadows dancing over both of their faces as the TV flickered. Beldam cleared her throat. “So…I can’t imagine your so-called ‘connections’ are going to be available at this hour. What are you going to do until then?”

Cerin pondered this for a moment, unused to having so many hours in the day. Normally they slept in even later than Vivian, but they’d been passed out for…they didn’t know how long. And now they finally processed the clawing emptiness in their stomach. “I’m starving.”

“Of course.” Her eye-rolling was almost audible.

They left her behind to enter the kitchen, except she followed them, like a lost child. She kept her distance still, leaning against the counter with her arms crossed, but her tailing them like this was…odd. Even so, they instead busied themself with searching the refrigerator, looking for anything that wasn’t mushroom-based.

“I’m going to wait until business hours to start asking around,” they explained into the refrigerator door. “But I’ve done them favors in the past, I don’t think they’ll refuse.”

“How does a kid like you have friends in such high places?” Beldam asked, her skepticism blurring the line into scathing.

“I make a living out of doing their menial labor. Also, my best friend’s the Glitz Pit champion. _Also,_ we saved the world.” _From you,_ they almost added but stopped themself.

“Fine, I get it.” Her tone was clipped enough that Cerin half wondered if she’d heard their unspoken thoughts. They pulled themself out of the refrigerator, dissatisfied with its contents, and turned to face her. She was examining her arm, one finger delicately tracing the edge of where her white skin met purple, but she dropped it and looked up when she felt their eyes on her.

“I must say I find the irony of a Shadow Siren with good publicity quite amusing,” she said with a smirk, whatever guiltiness they had imagined on her face long gone.

“Well, you know, things change. Sometimes it’s even for the better.” They didn’t look at her as they said this, now scanning the countertops for something edible. “Aren’t you ready to finally go home?”

Her silence told them all they needed to know, but they still risked a glance over their shoulder to find her turned away, hiding her face.

When she spoke again, her voice was quiet, betraying a sensitivity they had never known from her before. “I can never thank you enough.”

“Then don’t. Show me. Show us that you’re better.”

“Is that a challenge?” She faced them again, the low light and their night vision providing them with only the glinting of her eyes. “You’re on. Mark my words, Rerun, my acts of kindness will put even a bleeding heart like yourself to shame.”

Despite their best efforts, they smiled as they replied, “You’re welcome to try.” Beldam returned it, the points of her teeth not quite as carnivorous as they had seemed a few days ago.

Morning came, and the atmosphere of the house had changed entirely. Cerin had never consciously picked up on it before, but when Marilyn and Vivian went about their days pretending Beldam never existed…they were both tense and uncomfortable, the missing piece glaringly obvious even if they refused to acknowledge it. Now, with her here, with her _welcome_ here, that tension was gone, the underlying question of _what next_ no longer a threat. Marilyn spoke with more animation than Cerin had ever seen from her, Vivian’s smile was as bright as the moon outside, and Beldam’s disaffected, apathetic façade didn’t stand a chance against either. For all their faults, a family.

And now Cerin understood why Beldam had been so awkward before, conscious that they, now, were an afterthought to this new harmony.

They crept away into their room, unnoticed. But it didn’t bother them—what else were Shadow Sirens good for, anyway? None of their usual clients seemed to need them, either, judging by the radio silence of their Mailbox SP even after their quick apologies for being unexpectedly indisposed. And today clearly was not a six-AM-workout day for Tank, as he hadn’t seen their message yet. But it was fine. They knew how to busy themself. They put on their hat, feeling a little more presentable, and pocketed their Mailbox and headphones. As long as they acted like they had a purpose, no one would question them.

But when they went back out, skirting around the kitchen table where the other sirens sat, they barely put a hand on the door before Beldam demanded, “Where are you sneaking off to, Rerun?”

They had planned an alibi, leaving under the guise of getting in touch with their clients, but the gazes of all three sisters made the lie slip out of their grasp. Instead they mumbled something unintelligible and dropped their eyes to the floor.

Beldam caught on. “You’re not already putting yourself to work, are you? Give yourself a break, kid. You’ll burn out like a supernova at this rate.”

Being seen through didn’t make Cerin any more articulate. They stumbled over their words for another agonizing second before they said around the knot in their tongue, “But your house—”

“I am your client in that regard, am I not?” Beldam raised an eyebrow. “And I’m telling you it can wait. Come here.”

They would have been willing to argue with her, but the concerned look Vivian was giving them made them reluctant to die on this hill. So they slunk away from the door, leaning against the back of the couch behind them, as there were no more chairs. The awkwardness in the room snaked around their throat, until Beldam caught their eye and asked with a kind of mischievous smirk, “Has Marilyn ever told you the story of how she fist-fought three Clubbas at once?”

Blindsided, Cerin took an extra moment to process this. Beldam’s grin widening indicated that they had, in fact, heard correctly. They glanced up to meet Marilyn’s eyes and signed, “You did what?”

Marilyn tried to look serious, but the corners of her mouth twitched. She gave Beldam a pointed look as she replied, “You forgot to mention that I won. And like most things are, the whole situation was your fault.”

Cerin leaned forward eagerly, to the surprise of no one, as Vivian smiled despite shaking her head and Beldam sat back in her chair, pleased with her orchestration. Marilyn heaved a sigh, but the way she puffed out her chest a little as she straightened up was more telling.

So she told her tale, with her sisters jumping in to add detail or snide commentary. Cerin absorbed the story, amused at the collaborative effort it was becoming, but more than that, surprised at how natural it all felt. For the three sirens of the seventh generation to be talking, laughing, for Cerin to be included like one of them.

They couldn’t have stopped smiling even if they wanted to.


End file.
